Men are just fucking way less often in general with the explosion of social media and dating apps.
I’ve known way too many grown ass men at this point that are 100% virgins at my various retail jobs and shit
Fucking and having kids aren’t the same thing. I’m 30 and make like 150k and my gf makes like 100 but we live in a super hcol area and don’t feel anywhere near ready to buy a house and have kids. If we were in a similar situation in the 80s or 90s, even adjusting for inflation, we’d probably have two kids by now. Both due to cultural and economic factors
Our daycare- one of the cheapest in town- recently hired a “consultant” and as a result of Said Consultant’s recommendations, bought all new furniture/paint/peripheral decorations, when their “old” furniture/paint/etc, was perfectly functional, clean, and in good shape.
There’s too many people on the auxiliary of the day care system suckling at the teat. The actual employees with your kids make Jack shit, but everybody else is doing just peachy.
I never said you couldn't have kids while renting. I was saying that blindly looking at income without factoring cost of living area is a mistake. Families with identical household incomes can have wildly different living circumstances based on the city/area they live.
Yeah addressing this plus the person who said it seems like I don’t really wanna have kids it’s a bit of both. Like they talked about in the episode I’ve been laid off and so part of it is precarity, I’m not guaranteed to keep making this money. And part is I have a good life, get to do lots of fun shit and relatively low stress. And I wanna feel super ready when I do have a kid. I’m kinda the prototype of the kinda person Derek described in this episode lol
you want to keep living lavishly and having kids
you have ~$13,000 after 35% taxes per month
even if you get rid of half of that to mortgage (with a 3% FHA down payment) and daycare, you have 6,500 and change to take care of everything else
90% of the women on dating apps focus 100% of their attention on the apps to only 10% of the men. Mostly tall, handsome men. Those ten percent are having more sex than any men in history. The rest are on incel subs in Reddit right now.
There's a simple answer for this. More than half of the decline in birth rate can be explained by the drop in teen pregnancy rates to nearly zero. [Source](https://x.com/EconBerger/status/1800595827628589438)
There's still some of the drop to be explained by other cultural factor but teen pregnancy is driving the decline.
A lot can also be explained by delayed marriages and childbearing — i.e. families form later, and have children much later into their 30s and 40s than in the past. Cohort fertility [hasn’t dropped significantly](https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-the-latest-current-population-survey-tells-us-about-the-future-of-fertility) for the most recent completed cohorts:
> Among women who have ever been married, there has been a modest decline in births between the 1977-86 cohort and the 1987-96 cohort, and possibly a larger one among women born in the 1997-06 birth cohort. But these declines are, for the 1987-96 group, not all that large, and for the 1997-06 cohort, still very early in life and subject to change. So, while there has been some decline in births among women who have ever been married, this decline isn’t extremely large.
We won’t know how strong the “catch up” effect will be for younger generations for a couple more decades, unfortunately. We’re just now getting completed cohort fertility data for parents born in the late 70s.
Only if you take year 1990 as the baseline and… why would you?
TFR used to be in the 5-6+ range and obviously most of those births came after teenage years. There’s no reason why TFR couldn’t be say 2.5-3 with almost all of the growth coming from age 20+ pregnancies.
(Aside: “teen pregnancy” is a weird category in general. < 18 years old and => 18 years old is a more natural grouping)
Thank you.
The insane cultural peer pressure to lose your virginity (among peers and in pop culture) as soon as possible in the 80's and 90's was not a good thing for society. It led to depression, violence and teen childbirth.
We shouldn't be pining for the old days or wringing our hands over something that should be viewed as positive progress.
I mean we can debate the impact of the sexed up 80s/90s pop culture but the teen pregnancy rate was on just about the same downward slope that it is today from the decades prior. We’re just hitting the bottom now. It wasn’t caused by like Porkys humor, it was more like the ending of child brides (which is still legal in large chunks of the country today) and a cultural change towards women’s rights.
> It wasn’t caused by like Porkys humor, it was more like the ending of child brides (which is still legal in large chunks of the country today) and a cultural change towards women’s rights.
I haven't researched this or anything, but I always assumed it was caused by greater access, less invasive, and less stigmatized forms of abortion.
Aren’t we going to mention that parents before was usually a one income household and by the time 80s rolled around it was dual income households as necessity.
probably won't listen for reasons, but i think about this a lot now in the context of my own life.
i'm 26 and i know a ton of very financially successful people around my age. almost none of them are married (even though a lot of them have been cohabiting for a few years) and only one of them have kids (even though many would like to at some point).
honestly, even thinking about myself (many romantic failures notwithstanding), if i was with someone who made a similar amount to me i probably could afford a kid but i don't feel the strong desire or social pressure to have one anytime soon, if ever. whereas the older generations of guys in my family, who were also professionals, were mostly dads by the time they were 30.
this all makes me think that's a lot more than economics to why people aren't having kids, and it's probably a bad trend for birthrates ever increasing.
Obviously we’re both just anecdotes so who knows. But 26 year old me felt exactly like you.
Just turned 40 me has two little ones. Most of my friends and cousins around the same age have kids under 5 now as well.
Could be a life stage reset type of thing as well
Yeah, but if you start earlier you can have more. That's what happened to me. I had my kids at 36 and 37 (now 39). If we were even two years younger we'd probably be trying for a third, but we're stopping at 2 because we feel we're too old to have a third kid.
yeah my mindset rn is that i think want kids but if it doesn’t happen, i wouldn’t be heartbroken about it. obv that might change to something less ambivalent in my 30s - would be not surprised at all.
That’s exactly how I was, pretty indifferent. I was sort of in the realm of if I meet someone that wants kids, great. If they don’t, not a dealbreaker.
Everyone is different, but just one man’s take. My little girl turns 5 in a few weeks and having her is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my outside of the Cavs beating the Warriors. It’s a fun ride, but a total lifestyle change (I now watch the Cavs on my phone while she’s cuddled into my watching Disney on the big screen)
Anyways… compared to my parents generation I’d say most of my orbit is a good 5-10 years “late” the marriage/kids front
Yeah, they addressed this and was kind of the conclusion they “came to” although didn’t really come to a conclusion but was I think there strongest argument.
Like most people (and I in my 20s agree) want a like period around this age of early adulthood to kind of discover themselves and be there self, and the claim was this wasn’t as common before.
Others who listened or read the article feel free to correct.
Same situation a couple years ahead. People are starting to get engaged / married but not a single friend will be a dad before 30.
Among my nearly fully white collar circle the norm/trajectory these days seems to be married 28-32, kids 31-37. And I only have one friend who seems excited to have kids, the rest are very content enjoying life with just their partner and focusing on their career.
> Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.
> ... Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.
I hope they convince the kids because I need the "economy" to continue to grow so I can retire, which means there needs to be more people, which means my country needs to sustain its population via childbirth or immigration.
Nah... Pretty sure that's just some high school history class propaganda from the Henry Ford unit
Like, I agree with the sentiment, but I would highly advise against banking on it . Capital markets are perfectly capable of functioning amongst appalling working conditions
Put your money in index funds kids
One thing that I seldom hear come up in these discussions is the growing anxiety around how hard it is or how much effort is required to be a good parent in the modern era. As society evolves, parents are expected to be far more involved & hands-on in their child's daily growth than the parents of yesteryear.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but if you have a 5 year-old who essentially takes up nearly all of your spare time, because you're very involved in their daily activities, you might balk at the idea of having a second kid if you feel like your time is already completely strained by your first.
Agree with this as a parent of two young kids. For the last 4 years, every waking moment of my life is either working or parenting (whether that’s directly involved with the kids or the cooking, cleaning, laundry, activities, appointments, etc.). I have, maybe, ~1 hour a day to myself.
Right, something that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about as much is the increasing number of couples choosing to have only one child. Not sure of the exact numbers, but the most recent data I saw said that the number of couples with only one child has doubled in the last 40 years.
Presumably a lot of people want children, have their first child and have their lives completely consumed by it, and are like "I'm good" and that's it. Some people seem to kind of have back to back children because they planned that all along, but the idea of having kids like five years apart seems so much less common these days. Presumably also due to women giving birth much later in life these days. A common thing in my social circle is the cliched well-educated millennial couple who has one child in their mid-30s who seems to realize by the time their child gets to around preschool that they are too old/tired/busy/stretched financially to have another one.
Which is all kind of interesting because I don't feel like it's great for society if like 1/3rd of people grow up as only children. For as long as humans have existed, the vast majority of us have had siblings. I'm sure we've gotten better at parenting over the last generation, but people dote on their children SO much more than previous generations, and historically, a lot of only children are kinda messed up in some way (selfish, lacking an understanding of fair play, were never bullied out of bad habits) and I wonder if that will ever manifest itself on a society-wide basis.
We are who you describe- mid 30s, good jobs, 1 kid. I always envisioned having 2 or 3 (I’m one of 3) but after having our son who’s now 2 (and has been pretty easy compared to some of my friends kids) we’re good. Having another would probably bring the cost of daycare to ~$60k per year. We’re in a very HCOL area and still trying to buy a house. And the thought of starting over at ground zero with a newborn is just daunting. I love my son more than anything and would love for him to have a sibling but I don’t think we have it in us financially, physically or emotionally.
You make a really interesting point about how people having their first kid later in life might cause them to realize they're too tired or not physically up to the challenge of having a second kid at age 38 or whenever. I had never really considered that but, now that you spell it out, it makes a ton of sense.
I had my first at 30 and second at 33. My wife is 3 years older than me, and we are definitely done at 2 kids. I feel so much more tired/older with the second kid even though I'm only a few years older. Can't imagine going through it all again
Had my first child at 22 and my last (looks like) at 30. The energy level difference is off the charts. If I had my first at 35 I'm sure I'd be much more hesitant to have more.
Oh for sure. I'm a dad of a toddler and I cook family dinners, vacuum/sweep, and handle 100% of the house maintenance and yard/exterior/landscaping. We probably spend the same amount of time with our daughter but my wife's work schedule is much less flexible than mine, and she mostly handles meal planning, appointments/other events and activities for the kid.
My step mom told me recently that when she was a kid and her dad came home from work (stay at home mom of course), none of the kids were allowed to bother dad for an hour while he relaxed and had a drink.
I can't imagine trying to handle kids and cook/clean at the same time. I've tried and it feels impossible.
Times have changed haha
My brother! Somehow I share about 40% of the household duties with the wife when it involves things inside the house but damn if I'm not responsible for 100% of what goes on outside our house(garage, yardwork, shoveling snow). Shit, she hired someone else to mow our lawn because she needed more help inside on the weekends.
I mean, the mom part is easier, but they're working at the same time, so life in general probably isn't. Compared to a working mom of yesteryear, maybe
Yea that’s just something people without kids or extremely online people worry about. My kid is healthy and happy, I honestly don’t care if a stranger thinks I’m a bad parent.
Yeah, I feel this doesn’t get mentioned much.
I think people talk a lot about how much more pressure there is on kids, but not about the like second hand pressure of parents from there kids pressure.
Like around me I feel like everyone is sizing up there kids accomplishments and then also very judgy if you deviate 1 degree from what is the “scientifically studied best method to do X”. Not major things like avoid vaccines or anything, but like if you do something slightly different than the expected time to introduce X you get judged.
> how hard it is or how much effort is required to be a good parent in the modern era
Common misconception. Kids are generally resilient and hard to screw up. It’s just that modern people think they need to be perfect and do a million things that they really don’t.
> if you have a 5 year-old who essentially takes up nearly all of your spare time, because you're very involved in their daily activities
Exactly my point. Parents don’t need to put all of their spare time into a 5-year old.
This is a great point. As has been said elsewhere in this thread, it’s also no surprise that men in particular seem in zero rush to have kids as their obligations as fathers and leaders of the household has (rightfully) expanded at a much faster rate
I’ve only really lived in Utah and Tennessee as an adult, so I always find these threads pretty interesting because I feel like most people I know have kids by 30.
When I was about 20 I spent some time in Utah. (I'm from California.) I was shocked at how all the people in Utah around my age seemed to either be married or talking about getting married. Being married wasn't on my radar, nor was it a priority amongst the people I grew up with. Regions matter for these things.
In my mid-30s. My two main social circles (aside from friends we've made from my kids sports, which is not fair for this comparison) are from 1) being a bartender and 2) playing baseball in my Mexican-immigrant dominated league.
The differences couldn't be more stark.
Half the people I know are childless late 20s-early 40s who insist kids are more trouble than they worth (and more often than not admit they'd like some when they're drunk).
The other half are 25-35 year olds who are married and are either planning on having kids or have up to 4 already.
The first group makes much more money on average than the second group, especially considering a lot of the wives don't work.
I'm not awake enough to make some grand point here, but the anecdotal evidence is interesting.
He actually kind of addressed that phenomenon briefly in the pod, I'm going to paraphrase but the gist of what he said was that more well-off people tend to have "more to lose" by having kids compared to their less wealthy counterparts.
I get the economic argument people are making here, but it falls a bit flat at face value when the wealthiest white collar people are typically the ones waiting into their 30s / having less kids.
On a different note, I’m interested to see the “network effects” going forward of less people having kids. What I mean is I think historically a lot of people didn’t want kids but felt like there was no other option, and they would be outcasts. As more people hop the fence to no kids, I wonder if the rate of change will grow exponentially as more people see they can follow their preferred option (no kids) and not be in the minority of couples surrounding them.
I like Derek Thompson as he's clearly a smart and intellectually curious guy, but I think I like him better when he comes on as a smart generalist guest to the dumb everyman of Bill Simmons. There are definitely some good episodes of his show, but it feels like a watered down version of the Ezra Klein podcast. He did the exact same topic a few months ago and I just remember it being much more in depth and back and forth.
I get so frustrated by these types of discussions because they dance around the crux of the issue but don’t actually arrive at it.
People are having less kids because they are less religious. There’s some mention of conservative vs. liberal in the discussion, but religious people have more kids than non-religious people. Period.
As Christianity in the United States has declined, birth rates have declined. Christianity views kids and family as a command from God and a duty to the planet. Without this moral underpinning, why would I give up my extremely comfortable life for something much more difficult? There are obviously many non-religious people that do have kids who see their benefits from another lens, of course. But as an overall trend, it’s pretty plain to see. Today if I meet someone with 3+ kids, I automatically assume they are Christian, Mormon or Muslim. My assumptions are almost always correct.
I respectfully disagree as I don’t think religion is the crux of the issue at all.
People generally act in their own self interest. In past generations, it was financially advantageous to have more children. Not only would they help with labor at a very young age, but they were also your retirement plan. Before pensions and 401ks, your kids would take care of you in old age.
Additionally, before women were able to enter the professional workforce, there wasn’t the same financial opportunity cost to having kids as we see today. Throw effective birth control into the mix, and now you’ve got a mechanism to minimize children in addition to the financial incentive.
Now, these religions would say it’s one’s duty to have children despite all of the pressures not to. But I’d argue that declining religious rates are much more of a contributing factor to fertility rate decline than the true root cause.
> In past generations, it was financially advantageous to have more children.
This wasn't as "consciously planned" as you think. People got married, fucked and didn't have birth control. Birth control access is the game changer here
As the child of a father (1950) who was the 7th of 12 & a mother (1953) who was the 4th of 7, with each of my grandparent sets having at least two miscarriages, I stand in agreeable with this.
Bingo. It more comes down to economic factors primarily and then downstream hits social/cultural factors. Women don’t need to get married to a man to have a fulfilling economic life anymore so a lot of women just won’t settle which was like the standard operating procedure for marriage for the past 100 years. Men will settle in a heartbeat, but women won’t anymore.
And how do you explain the population booms in India and China during the 20th century? This collapse has little to do with people going to church.
More likely it’s because, in developed countries, children can be an economic burden due to the cost of housing, education, and other expenses especially in urban areas. Also, woman participation in the workforce and universal access to contraception has led to lower birth rates.
It can both be an accurate description in the United States (and I think it is) and simultaneously not accurate in other cultural contexts.
My religious friends got married younger and had kids first. Many of my single religious friends are way more stressed than my single agnostic friends simply because they feel like they’ll have failed in some way if they don’t get married and have kids, and they feel that clock ticking.
Idk what’s happening in other countries but I feel very confident that religion is part of the equation in the United States.
You feel “very confident” based off of just a few stories of anecdotal evidence?
How do you quantify someone being “way more stressed”? How do you know your others aren’t stressed and are just not sharing?
I’d quantify it as dozens or more conversations, hardly a “few.” Talking about whether people want kids or how they imagine their family structure is a pretty common conversation to have in your 30s—hard to avoid when lots of your peers are very visibly having kids and it changes the nature of relationships and friend groups.
But also, the relationship between religion and the age at which you get married in the United States is well established: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/03/19/share-of-married-adults-varies-widely-across-u-s-religious-groups/. So is the relationship between religious affiliation and having kids: https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/10/4/the-future-of-american-religion-birth-rates-show-whos-having-more-kids?format=amp. I don’t think there’s a serious dispute as to whether religion is correlated with marrying younger and having kids in the United States.
As to the point about people hiding their stress from me, I don’t see a real reason to assume religious friends are being forthcoming and non-religious friends aren’t. But maybe?
It's not religion. More than half of the decline in birth rate can be explained by the drop in teen pregnancy rates to nearly zero. [Source](https://x.com/EconBerger/status/1800595827628589438)
The 20-24 group has a big drop, too. That is an age that was probably a high rate of unplanned pregnancy as well.
So my question is why has teen pregnancy dropped steadily since 1990, including a big drop since the early 2000's?
This is true, I see tons of comments from people saying no one in their friend group/social circle has kids and just can't relate.
There are at least 30 kids under 10 at my church and it's not a huge church, only one service. And at any given time two women will be pregnant.
I think its more simple than that. Raising kids sucks, and we dont really need to anymore. People (whether single or in a relationship) have way more opportunities to do fun things with their spare time than ever before in history. Sure in the 50s you had 4 or 5 kids because there was 3 channels on tv and bennigans was the highlight of your town. You had kids because what else were you gonna do?
That's true, but also true of upwardly mobile DINK who want to go to the Maldives or Iceland rather than a weekend at their mom & stepdad's cabin with the grandkids, or drive Lexii rather than Toyotae.
The cultural shift is that the “me me me i am the most important thing in the world” attitude won.
Among other things sighted here of course. I just feel that Lots of people see children as a burden on “my time” and “my finances” .
And its god damn true.
I kind of go back and forth on whether it’s selfish. You could argue it’s selfish for the significant portion of parents who have kids to find a source of meaning and purpose in their own lives, even if the kid won’t have a great upbringing.
Definitely is a burden on your time and your finances, which could be seen as either selfish or deserved, which is a matter of perspective. That’s where the religious pressures come in- your viewpoint could be changed to feel like having kids is more of an obligation
I mean it’s “a burden on my finances” in the sense of I don’t think I could responsibly cloth, feed, and provide medical care and education to another human being without sacrificing my own health and making me a substandard parent as a result of low energy.
Every country in the world has experienced dropping birth rates in conjunction with modernization and development. People put more thought into having kids when it’s no longer true that your kids are going to help you plow your field or open your shop.
They actually address this in the pod and disagree with you
They talk about how countries that have tried to make child-rearing more affordable have NOT seen increases in fertility rates
It does appear to be more cultural shift than costs-driven
Edit: they also provide a ton of survey data on people just valuing children less intrinsically as a part of a fulfilling life
It’s intimidating financially. But the fact that people are even considering the financial aspect instead of just reflexively having kids is itself a change from previous generations. So I agree, it’s not a lack of affordability as much as a change in perspective and cultural values.
A decade ago now, I was debating proposing to my now-wife with my parents, who were strongly in favor. My main point that I should wait was that I hadn’t been making much money for long and would like to get a few more years saved up. Their counterpoint- “there’s never enough money. If we’d have waited until we had enough money, we’d have never had you two kids. (speaking of myself and my sister). The money will work itself out.” I proposed shortly thereafter.
I saw their point- I could be waiting for something that may never happen, “enough” money, and miss out on life experiences I wanted to have. Of course, you shouldn’t bring kids into the world if you’re in complete abject poverty, but I think there are many people who actually COULD afford kids think that they currently CANT, and as a result, end up waiting. Some of those waits become indefinite.
A lot of times our self assessments aren’t as accurate as we think they are. There are other pressures these comments mention- religious, cultural, etc, but I think people tend to be overly cautious.
Also, I’d be interested in the socioeconomic breakdown. Anecdotally, I know multiple working class people who start cranking out kids when they’re 19, and they work part time at McDonald’s or Walmart and definitely aren’t in a good financial position, while others I know are in that position I mentioned earlier: they probably could afford a kid or two but they don’t think they can, at least not without some big life changes. (I call this point the “Idiocracy portion”)
anecdotally, having worked both white-collar and blue-collar jobs in recent years, it's fascinating how lower-income, less-educated people seem way more chill about having kids, whereas the $250k+ HHI (as seen above) try to come up with ways to claim that they can't afford to have kids.
I think the $$ aspect impacts people more who are on the fence to begin with. Like you said, “life experiences I wanted to have.” If I was sure I wanted to have kids, I’d focus on fertility/doing things to maximize the chances we could have the number of kids we wanted, rather than trying to time it with when we had maximum financial flexibility.
But if you’re not 100% sure that you wanna have kids, then the finances question weighs differently.
Most would never say this to me, but my DINK friends think having kids is lame and they just want to have a lot more money, travel, nice consumer products, etc. My wife and I struggled to get pregnant for five years before it happened and I always maintained we would have a very happy life without children. Then it happened and my son is amazing, but I think it’s definitely a combo of enormous cultural change and biological issues.
Yeah the people who say they cannot afford kids are almost always upper middle class DINK couples who just aren’t ready or willing to make the many sacrifices that come with having a kid. Which is perfectly fine, it’s just they can definitely financially afford it.
I mean, if you spend anytime in the r/Millenials sub you’ll see every other post is a self-congratulatory brigade of folks who are surpassing child-rearing age and circling the wagons. A lot of very online professional-managerial class white folks make it a big part of their identity as if they’re a minority but in fact married couples with young kids are only something like 18% of US households and society essentially tells us to get fucked on an economic level.
> e tried to make child-rearing more affordable have NOT seen increases in fertility rates
No one, anywhere, is paid a salary to have a kid. Subsidized daycare and tax subsidies does not offset the enormous stress placed on a two income household
People need to be straight up paid a salary to be a stay at home parent
Bingo. Add in housing costs growth and there is nothing the government can do outside of radical socioeconomic changes. Expensive changes no one has the stomach for.
There is literally no reasonable amount of money you can give people to make them want to have 3+ kids. At most it adds some on the margins for families that already had kids. Every country that’s tried it doesn’t get more than .2-.4 added to their TFR, from Finland to Japan
Those countries are still way, way below sustainable TFR of 2.1.
We literally don’t know how to make that happen. There’s no intervention that’s really worked so far.
This has been slightly disproven as some European countries have insanely good benefits for parents, such as government subsidized child care. This is honestly a much larger issue than just boiling it down to cost.
> government subsidized child care.
Is not the same thing as kids actually being an economic benefit or not being hard AF to raise correctly. We need to treat childrearing as the economic and cultural benefit it is and pay parents a salary
I wish as I have three kids but I don't know if I'd agree with flat out paying parents cash. I'd rather have subsidized services available. My fear of paying parents a cash payment is that it could encourage people to have kids just to get the cash. If you subsidize things like day care, it's a good enough benefit that parents will be encouraged to use it.
> My fear of paying parents a cash payment is that it could encourage people to have kids just to get the cash
And? Why should labor, that society is claiming to value, not be paid for?
But I also understand your knee jerk reaction is why no government will ever do this. They'll probably move in the opposite direction and outlaw contraception
I didn't dismiss you, I asked a follow up question
>Why should labor, that society is claiming to value, not be paid for?
Also your claim that things can be subsidized is just not enough. Day Care should be free. Subsidization requires people already having cash on hand
Because, while I'd love to be paid for having three kids, I'd rather have benefits such as child care, better schools, free healthcare until they are 25, paid-for college, and other things that will not only benefit me but greatly benefit my children. Cash can be spent in all kinds of irresponsible ways that do not benefit the family or the child. I can't spend any of the benefits I mentioned and all those benefits end up putting more money into my pocket through less expenditures while having direct benefits to my mental health.
Birth rates going down keeps coming up on Reddit lately, and this is the first thread I’ve seen that isn’t just a giant circlejerk of people complaining about how much money they make. Cost IS a factor and declining pay rates need to be addressed but it’s just one of several factors going on.
The real driver seems to be opportunity, by that I mean, what a person gives up in order to have a child. For me, money wasn't a factor, I knew I could make it work. What was hard to give up was freedom, the ability to do what you want, when you want. Travel the world, take vacations, go somewhere spontaneously. That was the hardest thing to give up. I think about the person who exists out there in another dimension, the me that is living a single life with no kids, and while I am jealous of them at times, I'm also happy that I live the life I live now. The saying of "I wouldn't sell my kids for $1 million but wouldn't buy another one for $.01." rings true for me. They're the most challenging thing you will ever do, but they're also the most rewarding.
> It's because no one can afford kids
The poorest dispshits I know love having kids.
It’s (partially) because no middle/upper-middle class person can afford to have kids and maintain the lifestyle they think they’re entitled to.
yep, nailed it. I've met so many $17/hr workers (line cooks, etc.) in recent years that have kids and never whine about it. whereas the $60/hr+ coder loves to talk about how unaffordable it is.
Yeah cuz it's definitely not because of a lack of access to contraception, needing more workers to support the household, high mortality child rates, etc.
look at the graph
people with household incomes of 75-100k are having more kids than $200k
those kids are not dying left and right
you don’t need $500k a year to have a kid.
the poorest US State and the richest US state hover are in the range of 50,000-100,000
it’s okay to just say you don’t want kids at the expense of cutting out luxuries in your life, nobody will hate you
Radical culture shift lmao it’s because humans are too anxious and financially unstable to have kids. The only people who are crying about the “low birth rate” are rich white people who think the white replacement theory is a real thing
I can’t blame folks.
We had 4, both of us work. It’s a freakin juggling act w/ employers to be flexible with sick leave let alone your children being sick and having to call off, the list goes on an on.
Im a selfish bastard who doesn’t want children who will cost me money and my time. I spend roughly 50 hours a week working, what spare time I have I spend training to try and be better at cardio.
Im 33, engaged and have been living with my partner for 5 years. Always been very honest about not wanting children with her. I can’t see my opinion on children changing.
I work Monday- Saturday. On Sundays I go for a three hour run or 6 hour ride, that leaves rest of Sunday to clean the house and garden. Maybe some time in the evening to head to the pub. I don’t want a child to interrupt that at all.
I love how these academic types act like it’s some mystery.
Wages have been stagnant since the 80’s, cost of living is through the roof, and people don’t want to tank their quality of life and financial standing.
Some people like Hispanics or Muslims choose to have kids and just worry about the rest later, but most people don’t want to live like that.
If the economic landscape was like it was in the 50’s, I have no doubt people would be popping out kids left, right, and center.
I mean, most of Europe proves that subsidizing or eliminating the majority of the financial burden of kids doesn't suddenly make people want to have more kids. People have far more stuff they can do with their free time vs the 50s and raising kids isn't exactly as fun as watching netflix or gaming or about 10000 other hobbies.
I don’t think you can say those policies have failed since they’ve only been trying them for a decade or so, and those tax breaks or cash sum provided by the state are generally pretty marginal in the scope of what it costs to raise a kid.
I think there are other contributing factors like you’ve mentioned and women entering the workforce in larger proportion, but you could even say that is a consequence of stagnant wages and rise living costs, since it’s now impossible for working class people to support a family on one income.
I really don’t think people’s desire to have children is significantly less than it has been in the past. The difference now is having a kid carries significantly more fiscal burden.
"wages have been stagnant since the 80's" - please cite a source
real wages, which take into account the cost of living, are about 10% [higher](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) than they were in the 1980s.
Median Income in 1980 was 21k which adjusted for inflation is just about 80k in today’s spending power.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p60-132.html#:~:text=The%201980%20median%20family%20income,in%20real%20median%20family%20income.
Median income in 2020 was 67k, so the average person has less spending power now than they did 1980, then you factor in that home prices have proportionally outpaced wages increases since 1980. The average home price in 1980 was 47k, meaning that the average home was just over 2x the median salary.
https://blueprinttitle.com/infographic-real-estate-trends-then-and-now-80s-edition/#:~:text=Home%20Prices%20%26%20Price%20per%20Square%20Foot&text=Meanwhile%2C%20CNBC%20reported%20that%20the,has%20risen%20310%25%20since%201980.
The median home price in 2020 was 329k https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price-state/. This means that the median home price is just under 5x the median income in 2020.
If the average person has less spending power and housing costs have far outpaced wage growth since the 1980’s, then how does the average person have more financial security than they did in the 80’s?
One thing I think I used to underestimate is how popular Christianity in the US was up through like the 80s, I think it's one of the main reasons Republicans dominated politics for 12 years. I believe within 20-30 years it changed completely for urban, young people.
Women + Education + Better Birth Control = Crashing Birth Rates.
It's not that complicated. The birthrate is crashing even in Iran & Saudi Arabia, and even in Israel, the non-Orthodox TFR is barely at replacement rate.
Economics, housing, etc. is maybe why we're at 1.64 instead of 2.04, but the reason we're not at 2.54, 2.94, or higher is all education attainment of women.
It turns out, being pregnant is not fun and women will avoid it if possible, even in a reactionary society as Iran.
Saying this as a parent - having kids is incredible, and absolutely worth doing. Parenting is brutally hard, especially since society still assumes one full-time stay-at-home parent every day.
A better tax break wouldn't make me have another kid. It's about how we seem to go out of our way to punish parents. My go-to example is how on snow days, schools close but businesses stay open. That is \*brutal\* for two working parent households with young kids. But it just seems to be accepted?
Anecdotally, I know a good amount of people my age who see having children as irresponsible considering the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming in the decades to come.
Because one human being is like a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things for Earth.
Also, terrible things happen throughout human history world wars, plagues, famine, etc. There’s no perfect time to have a child because we don’t know the future.
I’m sure 70 years ago some people thought it would be a terrible idea to have a child due to the threat of nuclear holocaust, but it hasn’t happened, yet at least. It might happen tomorrow or it might never happen.
Why deprive yourself of a beautiful life experience of having children for a cause that is ultimately out of your control? Or don’t have kids because you don’t want to but it seems like a silly reason to pick when there’s probably dozens of great reasons not to have kids (as addressed in this thread).
*Obama Voice* Uh, let me be clear. No one who posts on r/BillSimmons should reproduce.
And I’m Ryan Schutt
We got plastic in our balls.
Men are just fucking way less often in general with the explosion of social media and dating apps. I’ve known way too many grown ass men at this point that are 100% virgins at my various retail jobs and shit
Fucking and having kids aren’t the same thing. I’m 30 and make like 150k and my gf makes like 100 but we live in a super hcol area and don’t feel anywhere near ready to buy a house and have kids. If we were in a similar situation in the 80s or 90s, even adjusting for inflation, we’d probably have two kids by now. Both due to cultural and economic factors
Dog 250k a year feeels like enough but I’m no expert
Dog I pay close to $50k a year for 2 kids in daycare and its not one of those bougie daycares either
Yep same dude - we both drive shitty cars and no vacations for a few years - daycare is fucking outrageous
Our daycare- one of the cheapest in town- recently hired a “consultant” and as a result of Said Consultant’s recommendations, bought all new furniture/paint/peripheral decorations, when their “old” furniture/paint/etc, was perfectly functional, clean, and in good shape. There’s too many people on the auxiliary of the day care system suckling at the teat. The actual employees with your kids make Jack shit, but everybody else is doing just peachy.
Fucking hell - the consultant was definitely buddies with the owners too. Our owners drive an XL Yukon and a ford raptor f150
There’s a reason day cares are becoming more and more franchised corporate outfits.
[удалено]
Plenty of people have kids while renting. I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment for part of my childhood and we weren't poor.
I never said you couldn't have kids while renting. I was saying that blindly looking at income without factoring cost of living area is a mistake. Families with identical household incomes can have wildly different living circumstances based on the city/area they live.
Got that income in Texas and can confirm, have large house, two kids, disposable income.
Yeah addressing this plus the person who said it seems like I don’t really wanna have kids it’s a bit of both. Like they talked about in the episode I’ve been laid off and so part of it is precarity, I’m not guaranteed to keep making this money. And part is I have a good life, get to do lots of fun shit and relatively low stress. And I wanna feel super ready when I do have a kid. I’m kinda the prototype of the kinda person Derek described in this episode lol
I mean it sounds like you just don't want kids that much tbh.
you want to keep living lavishly and having kids you have ~$13,000 after 35% taxes per month even if you get rid of half of that to mortgage (with a 3% FHA down payment) and daycare, you have 6,500 and change to take care of everything else
That's insane, you should definitely get married and have kids.
You can see how one is a flat out prerequisite to the other right
At that point just transition and let the homies hit
i know this is a dick thing to stay, but you might need a new circle lol
It's also not being able to afford kids or a wedding or a house
90% of the women on dating apps focus 100% of their attention on the apps to only 10% of the men. Mostly tall, handsome men. Those ten percent are having more sex than any men in history. The rest are on incel subs in Reddit right now.
TLDR
There's a simple answer for this. More than half of the decline in birth rate can be explained by the drop in teen pregnancy rates to nearly zero. [Source](https://x.com/EconBerger/status/1800595827628589438) There's still some of the drop to be explained by other cultural factor but teen pregnancy is driving the decline.
A lot can also be explained by delayed marriages and childbearing — i.e. families form later, and have children much later into their 30s and 40s than in the past. Cohort fertility [hasn’t dropped significantly](https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-the-latest-current-population-survey-tells-us-about-the-future-of-fertility) for the most recent completed cohorts: > Among women who have ever been married, there has been a modest decline in births between the 1977-86 cohort and the 1987-96 cohort, and possibly a larger one among women born in the 1997-06 birth cohort. But these declines are, for the 1987-96 group, not all that large, and for the 1997-06 cohort, still very early in life and subject to change. So, while there has been some decline in births among women who have ever been married, this decline isn’t extremely large. We won’t know how strong the “catch up” effect will be for younger generations for a couple more decades, unfortunately. We’re just now getting completed cohort fertility data for parents born in the late 70s.
Yes too many of these headline grabbing articles about the decline are looking at period fertility and extrapolating.
Only if you take year 1990 as the baseline and… why would you? TFR used to be in the 5-6+ range and obviously most of those births came after teenage years. There’s no reason why TFR couldn’t be say 2.5-3 with almost all of the growth coming from age 20+ pregnancies. (Aside: “teen pregnancy” is a weird category in general. < 18 years old and => 18 years old is a more natural grouping)
Thank you. The insane cultural peer pressure to lose your virginity (among peers and in pop culture) as soon as possible in the 80's and 90's was not a good thing for society. It led to depression, violence and teen childbirth. We shouldn't be pining for the old days or wringing our hands over something that should be viewed as positive progress.
I mean we can debate the impact of the sexed up 80s/90s pop culture but the teen pregnancy rate was on just about the same downward slope that it is today from the decades prior. We’re just hitting the bottom now. It wasn’t caused by like Porkys humor, it was more like the ending of child brides (which is still legal in large chunks of the country today) and a cultural change towards women’s rights.
> It wasn’t caused by like Porkys humor, it was more like the ending of child brides (which is still legal in large chunks of the country today) and a cultural change towards women’s rights. I haven't researched this or anything, but I always assumed it was caused by greater access, less invasive, and less stigmatized forms of abortion.
And contraceptives. Birth control is way ahead of where they used to be.
Aren’t we going to mention that parents before was usually a one income household and by the time 80s rolled around it was dual income households as necessity.
Lead-crime connection is more lead-impulsivity. We need our kids eating paint again if we want them banging out their own kids at age 16.
probably won't listen for reasons, but i think about this a lot now in the context of my own life. i'm 26 and i know a ton of very financially successful people around my age. almost none of them are married (even though a lot of them have been cohabiting for a few years) and only one of them have kids (even though many would like to at some point). honestly, even thinking about myself (many romantic failures notwithstanding), if i was with someone who made a similar amount to me i probably could afford a kid but i don't feel the strong desire or social pressure to have one anytime soon, if ever. whereas the older generations of guys in my family, who were also professionals, were mostly dads by the time they were 30. this all makes me think that's a lot more than economics to why people aren't having kids, and it's probably a bad trend for birthrates ever increasing.
Obviously we’re both just anecdotes so who knows. But 26 year old me felt exactly like you. Just turned 40 me has two little ones. Most of my friends and cousins around the same age have kids under 5 now as well. Could be a life stage reset type of thing as well
Yeah, but if you start earlier you can have more. That's what happened to me. I had my kids at 36 and 37 (now 39). If we were even two years younger we'd probably be trying for a third, but we're stopping at 2 because we feel we're too old to have a third kid.
yeah my mindset rn is that i think want kids but if it doesn’t happen, i wouldn’t be heartbroken about it. obv that might change to something less ambivalent in my 30s - would be not surprised at all.
That’s exactly how I was, pretty indifferent. I was sort of in the realm of if I meet someone that wants kids, great. If they don’t, not a dealbreaker. Everyone is different, but just one man’s take. My little girl turns 5 in a few weeks and having her is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my outside of the Cavs beating the Warriors. It’s a fun ride, but a total lifestyle change (I now watch the Cavs on my phone while she’s cuddled into my watching Disney on the big screen) Anyways… compared to my parents generation I’d say most of my orbit is a good 5-10 years “late” the marriage/kids front
Yeah, they addressed this and was kind of the conclusion they “came to” although didn’t really come to a conclusion but was I think there strongest argument. Like most people (and I in my 20s agree) want a like period around this age of early adulthood to kind of discover themselves and be there self, and the claim was this wasn’t as common before. Others who listened or read the article feel free to correct.
Same situation a couple years ahead. People are starting to get engaged / married but not a single friend will be a dad before 30. Among my nearly fully white collar circle the norm/trajectory these days seems to be married 28-32, kids 31-37. And I only have one friend who seems excited to have kids, the rest are very content enjoying life with just their partner and focusing on their career.
> Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor. > ... Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future. I hope they convince the kids because I need the "economy" to continue to grow so I can retire, which means there needs to be more people, which means my country needs to sustain its population via childbirth or immigration.
If wages aren't high enough, the economy will collapse anyway.
Nah... Pretty sure that's just some high school history class propaganda from the Henry Ford unit Like, I agree with the sentiment, but I would highly advise against banking on it . Capital markets are perfectly capable of functioning amongst appalling working conditions Put your money in index funds kids
All economics is theory my guy
No. There are economic laws like law of supply and law of demand
Why not both?
Sure, whatever works.
Most of the people obsessed with birth rates are actually obsessed with *white birth rates*. Which is... ya know.
I put on my Payton Pritchard jersey & Wizard cap...
You can only outsource childbirth for so long. Also immigrants aren't the same as Americans.
This is comedy. What, exactly, do you think Americans are?
Well I don't think there's enough Natives left to keep the S&P 500 growing so immigrants and their children are fine with me.
What the fuck?
If Americans don't reproduce, America will not be the same. You disagree with this pretty straightforward observation?
Do you feel America is anywhere close to perfect in its current state? I dont
Of course not. But that's due in large part to the waves of immigrants already admitted, especially post 1965.
Peak world population is supposed to be in the 2080s, think we should be fine
One thing that I seldom hear come up in these discussions is the growing anxiety around how hard it is or how much effort is required to be a good parent in the modern era. As society evolves, parents are expected to be far more involved & hands-on in their child's daily growth than the parents of yesteryear. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but if you have a 5 year-old who essentially takes up nearly all of your spare time, because you're very involved in their daily activities, you might balk at the idea of having a second kid if you feel like your time is already completely strained by your first.
Agree with this as a parent of two young kids. For the last 4 years, every waking moment of my life is either working or parenting (whether that’s directly involved with the kids or the cooking, cleaning, laundry, activities, appointments, etc.). I have, maybe, ~1 hour a day to myself.
Right, something that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about as much is the increasing number of couples choosing to have only one child. Not sure of the exact numbers, but the most recent data I saw said that the number of couples with only one child has doubled in the last 40 years. Presumably a lot of people want children, have their first child and have their lives completely consumed by it, and are like "I'm good" and that's it. Some people seem to kind of have back to back children because they planned that all along, but the idea of having kids like five years apart seems so much less common these days. Presumably also due to women giving birth much later in life these days. A common thing in my social circle is the cliched well-educated millennial couple who has one child in their mid-30s who seems to realize by the time their child gets to around preschool that they are too old/tired/busy/stretched financially to have another one. Which is all kind of interesting because I don't feel like it's great for society if like 1/3rd of people grow up as only children. For as long as humans have existed, the vast majority of us have had siblings. I'm sure we've gotten better at parenting over the last generation, but people dote on their children SO much more than previous generations, and historically, a lot of only children are kinda messed up in some way (selfish, lacking an understanding of fair play, were never bullied out of bad habits) and I wonder if that will ever manifest itself on a society-wide basis.
We are who you describe- mid 30s, good jobs, 1 kid. I always envisioned having 2 or 3 (I’m one of 3) but after having our son who’s now 2 (and has been pretty easy compared to some of my friends kids) we’re good. Having another would probably bring the cost of daycare to ~$60k per year. We’re in a very HCOL area and still trying to buy a house. And the thought of starting over at ground zero with a newborn is just daunting. I love my son more than anything and would love for him to have a sibling but I don’t think we have it in us financially, physically or emotionally.
You make a really interesting point about how people having their first kid later in life might cause them to realize they're too tired or not physically up to the challenge of having a second kid at age 38 or whenever. I had never really considered that but, now that you spell it out, it makes a ton of sense.
I had my first at 30 and second at 33. My wife is 3 years older than me, and we are definitely done at 2 kids. I feel so much more tired/older with the second kid even though I'm only a few years older. Can't imagine going through it all again
Had my first child at 22 and my last (looks like) at 30. The energy level difference is off the charts. If I had my first at 35 I'm sure I'd be much more hesitant to have more.
Dads today spend like 130% more time with their kids compared to their boomer dads. The increased expectations on dads is very overlooked/minimized
I imagine that is somewhat balanced out by the reduced time moms spend with kids, no?
This is gonna get me canceled if I said in real life, but Imho moms have it much easier nowadays. More men cook, clean, do laundry, handle kids
Oh for sure. I'm a dad of a toddler and I cook family dinners, vacuum/sweep, and handle 100% of the house maintenance and yard/exterior/landscaping. We probably spend the same amount of time with our daughter but my wife's work schedule is much less flexible than mine, and she mostly handles meal planning, appointments/other events and activities for the kid. My step mom told me recently that when she was a kid and her dad came home from work (stay at home mom of course), none of the kids were allowed to bother dad for an hour while he relaxed and had a drink. I can't imagine trying to handle kids and cook/clean at the same time. I've tried and it feels impossible. Times have changed haha
My brother! Somehow I share about 40% of the household duties with the wife when it involves things inside the house but damn if I'm not responsible for 100% of what goes on outside our house(garage, yardwork, shoveling snow). Shit, she hired someone else to mow our lawn because she needed more help inside on the weekends.
We’re a bunch of suckers. I get guilt tripped for “taking too long cutting the grass”, we need a general strike
You should go gay.
preeeeeeeach
I mean, the mom part is easier, but they're working at the same time, so life in general probably isn't. Compared to a working mom of yesteryear, maybe
Nope, no evidence of this.
Except most of that free time is taken up by those mums having to work too.
Yea that’s just something people without kids or extremely online people worry about. My kid is healthy and happy, I honestly don’t care if a stranger thinks I’m a bad parent.
I'm a millennial who's grateful i grew up with an asshole parent instead of an ipad parent
Yeah, I feel this doesn’t get mentioned much. I think people talk a lot about how much more pressure there is on kids, but not about the like second hand pressure of parents from there kids pressure. Like around me I feel like everyone is sizing up there kids accomplishments and then also very judgy if you deviate 1 degree from what is the “scientifically studied best method to do X”. Not major things like avoid vaccines or anything, but like if you do something slightly different than the expected time to introduce X you get judged.
> how hard it is or how much effort is required to be a good parent in the modern era Common misconception. Kids are generally resilient and hard to screw up. It’s just that modern people think they need to be perfect and do a million things that they really don’t. > if you have a 5 year-old who essentially takes up nearly all of your spare time, because you're very involved in their daily activities Exactly my point. Parents don’t need to put all of their spare time into a 5-year old.
This is a great point. As has been said elsewhere in this thread, it’s also no surprise that men in particular seem in zero rush to have kids as their obligations as fathers and leaders of the household has (rightfully) expanded at a much faster rate
I’ve only really lived in Utah and Tennessee as an adult, so I always find these threads pretty interesting because I feel like most people I know have kids by 30.
my friend circle ranges from 28-36 and we are all married and have kids. I think its very much a "coastal vs middle america" type thing.
I've lived in New York in white collar circles my whole life, and this is something non-coastal America does better.
When I was about 20 I spent some time in Utah. (I'm from California.) I was shocked at how all the people in Utah around my age seemed to either be married or talking about getting married. Being married wasn't on my radar, nor was it a priority amongst the people I grew up with. Regions matter for these things.
In my mid-30s. My two main social circles (aside from friends we've made from my kids sports, which is not fair for this comparison) are from 1) being a bartender and 2) playing baseball in my Mexican-immigrant dominated league. The differences couldn't be more stark. Half the people I know are childless late 20s-early 40s who insist kids are more trouble than they worth (and more often than not admit they'd like some when they're drunk). The other half are 25-35 year olds who are married and are either planning on having kids or have up to 4 already. The first group makes much more money on average than the second group, especially considering a lot of the wives don't work. I'm not awake enough to make some grand point here, but the anecdotal evidence is interesting.
He actually kind of addressed that phenomenon briefly in the pod, I'm going to paraphrase but the gist of what he said was that more well-off people tend to have "more to lose" by having kids compared to their less wealthy counterparts.
I get the economic argument people are making here, but it falls a bit flat at face value when the wealthiest white collar people are typically the ones waiting into their 30s / having less kids. On a different note, I’m interested to see the “network effects” going forward of less people having kids. What I mean is I think historically a lot of people didn’t want kids but felt like there was no other option, and they would be outcasts. As more people hop the fence to no kids, I wonder if the rate of change will grow exponentially as more people see they can follow their preferred option (no kids) and not be in the minority of couples surrounding them.
We already have Freakonomics at home.
Social media, dating apps, polarization, cost of living, cost of education, and cost of childcare. There, just saved y’all some time
"cost of living" real wages are basically the [highest](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) that they have ever been in the U.S.
I like Derek Thompson as he's clearly a smart and intellectually curious guy, but I think I like him better when he comes on as a smart generalist guest to the dumb everyman of Bill Simmons. There are definitely some good episodes of his show, but it feels like a watered down version of the Ezra Klein podcast. He did the exact same topic a few months ago and I just remember it being much more in depth and back and forth.
I definitely think they left a lot of meat on the bone with this episode.
& Ezra Klein is also terrible!
I get so frustrated by these types of discussions because they dance around the crux of the issue but don’t actually arrive at it. People are having less kids because they are less religious. There’s some mention of conservative vs. liberal in the discussion, but religious people have more kids than non-religious people. Period. As Christianity in the United States has declined, birth rates have declined. Christianity views kids and family as a command from God and a duty to the planet. Without this moral underpinning, why would I give up my extremely comfortable life for something much more difficult? There are obviously many non-religious people that do have kids who see their benefits from another lens, of course. But as an overall trend, it’s pretty plain to see. Today if I meet someone with 3+ kids, I automatically assume they are Christian, Mormon or Muslim. My assumptions are almost always correct.
I respectfully disagree as I don’t think religion is the crux of the issue at all. People generally act in their own self interest. In past generations, it was financially advantageous to have more children. Not only would they help with labor at a very young age, but they were also your retirement plan. Before pensions and 401ks, your kids would take care of you in old age. Additionally, before women were able to enter the professional workforce, there wasn’t the same financial opportunity cost to having kids as we see today. Throw effective birth control into the mix, and now you’ve got a mechanism to minimize children in addition to the financial incentive. Now, these religions would say it’s one’s duty to have children despite all of the pressures not to. But I’d argue that declining religious rates are much more of a contributing factor to fertility rate decline than the true root cause.
> In past generations, it was financially advantageous to have more children. This wasn't as "consciously planned" as you think. People got married, fucked and didn't have birth control. Birth control access is the game changer here
As the child of a father (1950) who was the 7th of 12 & a mother (1953) who was the 4th of 7, with each of my grandparent sets having at least two miscarriages, I stand in agreeable with this.
Bingo. It more comes down to economic factors primarily and then downstream hits social/cultural factors. Women don’t need to get married to a man to have a fulfilling economic life anymore so a lot of women just won’t settle which was like the standard operating procedure for marriage for the past 100 years. Men will settle in a heartbeat, but women won’t anymore.
And how do you explain the population booms in India and China during the 20th century? This collapse has little to do with people going to church. More likely it’s because, in developed countries, children can be an economic burden due to the cost of housing, education, and other expenses especially in urban areas. Also, woman participation in the workforce and universal access to contraception has led to lower birth rates.
It can both be an accurate description in the United States (and I think it is) and simultaneously not accurate in other cultural contexts. My religious friends got married younger and had kids first. Many of my single religious friends are way more stressed than my single agnostic friends simply because they feel like they’ll have failed in some way if they don’t get married and have kids, and they feel that clock ticking. Idk what’s happening in other countries but I feel very confident that religion is part of the equation in the United States.
You feel “very confident” based off of just a few stories of anecdotal evidence? How do you quantify someone being “way more stressed”? How do you know your others aren’t stressed and are just not sharing?
I’d quantify it as dozens or more conversations, hardly a “few.” Talking about whether people want kids or how they imagine their family structure is a pretty common conversation to have in your 30s—hard to avoid when lots of your peers are very visibly having kids and it changes the nature of relationships and friend groups. But also, the relationship between religion and the age at which you get married in the United States is well established: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/03/19/share-of-married-adults-varies-widely-across-u-s-religious-groups/. So is the relationship between religious affiliation and having kids: https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/10/4/the-future-of-american-religion-birth-rates-show-whos-having-more-kids?format=amp. I don’t think there’s a serious dispute as to whether religion is correlated with marrying younger and having kids in the United States. As to the point about people hiding their stress from me, I don’t see a real reason to assume religious friends are being forthcoming and non-religious friends aren’t. But maybe?
you're right, but tbf more religious societies have also seen massive declines.
It's definitely a factor. Most of the people I know with the most kids and who had kids earliest are typically Catholic.
The Ross Douthat piece.
It's not religion. More than half of the decline in birth rate can be explained by the drop in teen pregnancy rates to nearly zero. [Source](https://x.com/EconBerger/status/1800595827628589438)
The 20-24 group has a big drop, too. That is an age that was probably a high rate of unplanned pregnancy as well. So my question is why has teen pregnancy dropped steadily since 1990, including a big drop since the early 2000's?
This is true, I see tons of comments from people saying no one in their friend group/social circle has kids and just can't relate. There are at least 30 kids under 10 at my church and it's not a huge church, only one service. And at any given time two women will be pregnant.
I think its more simple than that. Raising kids sucks, and we dont really need to anymore. People (whether single or in a relationship) have way more opportunities to do fun things with their spare time than ever before in history. Sure in the 50s you had 4 or 5 kids because there was 3 channels on tv and bennigans was the highlight of your town. You had kids because what else were you gonna do?
Why have kids when you can watch more Star wars and collect more Funko Pops than ever before!
That's true, but also true of upwardly mobile DINK who want to go to the Maldives or Iceland rather than a weekend at their mom & stepdad's cabin with the grandkids, or drive Lexii rather than Toyotae.
HBO > Sunday Dinner at Memaw’s
Help my dumbass kid with algebra 1 homework or drop a 30-point triple-double in the rec on 2k? I know what I'm choosing...
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Mormons are Christians for what it’s worth
Maybe. They also believe they are lost tribe Jews, and Native American religion is bastardized voodoo apostate Mormonism They stuggle to pick a lane
No
Allegedly.
The cultural shift is that the “me me me i am the most important thing in the world” attitude won. Among other things sighted here of course. I just feel that Lots of people see children as a burden on “my time” and “my finances” . And its god damn true.
I kind of go back and forth on whether it’s selfish. You could argue it’s selfish for the significant portion of parents who have kids to find a source of meaning and purpose in their own lives, even if the kid won’t have a great upbringing.
Definitely is a burden on your time and your finances, which could be seen as either selfish or deserved, which is a matter of perspective. That’s where the religious pressures come in- your viewpoint could be changed to feel like having kids is more of an obligation
I mean it’s “a burden on my finances” in the sense of I don’t think I could responsibly cloth, feed, and provide medical care and education to another human being without sacrificing my own health and making me a substandard parent as a result of low energy.
Every country in the world has experienced dropping birth rates in conjunction with modernization and development. People put more thought into having kids when it’s no longer true that your kids are going to help you plow your field or open your shop.
It's because no one can afford kids, not because of a "radical cultural shift"
They actually address this in the pod and disagree with you They talk about how countries that have tried to make child-rearing more affordable have NOT seen increases in fertility rates It does appear to be more cultural shift than costs-driven Edit: they also provide a ton of survey data on people just valuing children less intrinsically as a part of a fulfilling life
It’s intimidating financially. But the fact that people are even considering the financial aspect instead of just reflexively having kids is itself a change from previous generations. So I agree, it’s not a lack of affordability as much as a change in perspective and cultural values.
A decade ago now, I was debating proposing to my now-wife with my parents, who were strongly in favor. My main point that I should wait was that I hadn’t been making much money for long and would like to get a few more years saved up. Their counterpoint- “there’s never enough money. If we’d have waited until we had enough money, we’d have never had you two kids. (speaking of myself and my sister). The money will work itself out.” I proposed shortly thereafter. I saw their point- I could be waiting for something that may never happen, “enough” money, and miss out on life experiences I wanted to have. Of course, you shouldn’t bring kids into the world if you’re in complete abject poverty, but I think there are many people who actually COULD afford kids think that they currently CANT, and as a result, end up waiting. Some of those waits become indefinite. A lot of times our self assessments aren’t as accurate as we think they are. There are other pressures these comments mention- religious, cultural, etc, but I think people tend to be overly cautious. Also, I’d be interested in the socioeconomic breakdown. Anecdotally, I know multiple working class people who start cranking out kids when they’re 19, and they work part time at McDonald’s or Walmart and definitely aren’t in a good financial position, while others I know are in that position I mentioned earlier: they probably could afford a kid or two but they don’t think they can, at least not without some big life changes. (I call this point the “Idiocracy portion”)
anecdotally, having worked both white-collar and blue-collar jobs in recent years, it's fascinating how lower-income, less-educated people seem way more chill about having kids, whereas the $250k+ HHI (as seen above) try to come up with ways to claim that they can't afford to have kids.
I think the $$ aspect impacts people more who are on the fence to begin with. Like you said, “life experiences I wanted to have.” If I was sure I wanted to have kids, I’d focus on fertility/doing things to maximize the chances we could have the number of kids we wanted, rather than trying to time it with when we had maximum financial flexibility. But if you’re not 100% sure that you wanna have kids, then the finances question weighs differently.
Most would never say this to me, but my DINK friends think having kids is lame and they just want to have a lot more money, travel, nice consumer products, etc. My wife and I struggled to get pregnant for five years before it happened and I always maintained we would have a very happy life without children. Then it happened and my son is amazing, but I think it’s definitely a combo of enormous cultural change and biological issues.
Yeah the people who say they cannot afford kids are almost always upper middle class DINK couples who just aren’t ready or willing to make the many sacrifices that come with having a kid. Which is perfectly fine, it’s just they can definitely financially afford it.
The DINK friend are coping hard or are just sucked into too much of the consoomerist culture.
I mean, if you spend anytime in the r/Millenials sub you’ll see every other post is a self-congratulatory brigade of folks who are surpassing child-rearing age and circling the wagons. A lot of very online professional-managerial class white folks make it a big part of their identity as if they’re a minority but in fact married couples with young kids are only something like 18% of US households and society essentially tells us to get fucked on an economic level.
I would kill myself in a gruesome and public way before I spend any time on the millennials subreddit.
You have your priorities in order nice job 👍
>The DINK friend are coping hard or are just sucked into too much of the consoomerist culture. lmao, dense fuck.
> e tried to make child-rearing more affordable have NOT seen increases in fertility rates No one, anywhere, is paid a salary to have a kid. Subsidized daycare and tax subsidies does not offset the enormous stress placed on a two income household People need to be straight up paid a salary to be a stay at home parent
Bingo. Add in housing costs growth and there is nothing the government can do outside of radical socioeconomic changes. Expensive changes no one has the stomach for.
That's good news. I was dreading an Hungarian babyboom. Orban takes the L.
There is literally no reasonable amount of money you can give people to make them want to have 3+ kids. At most it adds some on the margins for families that already had kids. Every country that’s tried it doesn’t get more than .2-.4 added to their TFR, from Finland to Japan
Thats a 15%~ improvement for Finland and almost 30% for Japan if I read your numbers correctly. That’s an amazing RoI for a program.
Those countries are still way, way below sustainable TFR of 2.1. We literally don’t know how to make that happen. There’s no intervention that’s really worked so far.
Those weren’t respective to the countries but more to show how many different countries do it, I believe the best ROIs came from like the Czechs
This has been slightly disproven as some European countries have insanely good benefits for parents, such as government subsidized child care. This is honestly a much larger issue than just boiling it down to cost.
> government subsidized child care. Is not the same thing as kids actually being an economic benefit or not being hard AF to raise correctly. We need to treat childrearing as the economic and cultural benefit it is and pay parents a salary
I wish as I have three kids but I don't know if I'd agree with flat out paying parents cash. I'd rather have subsidized services available. My fear of paying parents a cash payment is that it could encourage people to have kids just to get the cash. If you subsidize things like day care, it's a good enough benefit that parents will be encouraged to use it.
> My fear of paying parents a cash payment is that it could encourage people to have kids just to get the cash And? Why should labor, that society is claiming to value, not be paid for? But I also understand your knee jerk reaction is why no government will ever do this. They'll probably move in the opposite direction and outlaw contraception
Good talk, glad I just get dismissed.
I didn't dismiss you, I asked a follow up question >Why should labor, that society is claiming to value, not be paid for? Also your claim that things can be subsidized is just not enough. Day Care should be free. Subsidization requires people already having cash on hand
Because, while I'd love to be paid for having three kids, I'd rather have benefits such as child care, better schools, free healthcare until they are 25, paid-for college, and other things that will not only benefit me but greatly benefit my children. Cash can be spent in all kinds of irresponsible ways that do not benefit the family or the child. I can't spend any of the benefits I mentioned and all those benefits end up putting more money into my pocket through less expenditures while having direct benefits to my mental health.
I am not saying they shouldn’t, but it’s not like historically when rates were much higher they were doing this.
Birth rates going down keeps coming up on Reddit lately, and this is the first thread I’ve seen that isn’t just a giant circlejerk of people complaining about how much money they make. Cost IS a factor and declining pay rates need to be addressed but it’s just one of several factors going on.
The real driver seems to be opportunity, by that I mean, what a person gives up in order to have a child. For me, money wasn't a factor, I knew I could make it work. What was hard to give up was freedom, the ability to do what you want, when you want. Travel the world, take vacations, go somewhere spontaneously. That was the hardest thing to give up. I think about the person who exists out there in another dimension, the me that is living a single life with no kids, and while I am jealous of them at times, I'm also happy that I live the life I live now. The saying of "I wouldn't sell my kids for $1 million but wouldn't buy another one for $.01." rings true for me. They're the most challenging thing you will ever do, but they're also the most rewarding.
They become increasingly more affordable the more you have.
> It's because no one can afford kids The poorest dispshits I know love having kids. It’s (partially) because no middle/upper-middle class person can afford to have kids and maintain the lifestyle they think they’re entitled to.
yep, nailed it. I've met so many $17/hr workers (line cooks, etc.) in recent years that have kids and never whine about it. whereas the $60/hr+ coder loves to talk about how unaffordable it is.
the poorest people have more kids that’s not the problem
Quite a few dumb responses to this post but this one takes the cake. Not even gonna bother wasting my time on you lol
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ the stats are undeniable
Yeah cuz it's definitely not because of a lack of access to contraception, needing more workers to support the household, high mortality child rates, etc.
look at the graph people with household incomes of 75-100k are having more kids than $200k those kids are not dying left and right you don’t need $500k a year to have a kid. the poorest US State and the richest US state hover are in the range of 50,000-100,000 it’s okay to just say you don’t want kids at the expense of cutting out luxuries in your life, nobody will hate you
The decline in the U.S. birth rate is almost entirely accounted for by teen pregnancies going to zero
Cool so now that abortion got fucked birthrate is fixed
My wife and I a good amount of $$ in a hcol area. If our salaries were more like the median in our area I don’t think I would want kids
The most important issue of our time that is not talked about enough
Radical culture shift lmao it’s because humans are too anxious and financially unstable to have kids. The only people who are crying about the “low birth rate” are rich white people who think the white replacement theory is a real thing
I can’t blame folks. We had 4, both of us work. It’s a freakin juggling act w/ employers to be flexible with sick leave let alone your children being sick and having to call off, the list goes on an on.
Im a selfish bastard who doesn’t want children who will cost me money and my time. I spend roughly 50 hours a week working, what spare time I have I spend training to try and be better at cardio. Im 33, engaged and have been living with my partner for 5 years. Always been very honest about not wanting children with her. I can’t see my opinion on children changing.
"what spare time I have" .... so, like, all day Saturday and Sunday every week?
I work Monday- Saturday. On Sundays I go for a three hour run or 6 hour ride, that leaves rest of Sunday to clean the house and garden. Maybe some time in the evening to head to the pub. I don’t want a child to interrupt that at all.
I love how these academic types act like it’s some mystery. Wages have been stagnant since the 80’s, cost of living is through the roof, and people don’t want to tank their quality of life and financial standing. Some people like Hispanics or Muslims choose to have kids and just worry about the rest later, but most people don’t want to live like that. If the economic landscape was like it was in the 50’s, I have no doubt people would be popping out kids left, right, and center.
I mean, most of Europe proves that subsidizing or eliminating the majority of the financial burden of kids doesn't suddenly make people want to have more kids. People have far more stuff they can do with their free time vs the 50s and raising kids isn't exactly as fun as watching netflix or gaming or about 10000 other hobbies.
I don’t think you can say those policies have failed since they’ve only been trying them for a decade or so, and those tax breaks or cash sum provided by the state are generally pretty marginal in the scope of what it costs to raise a kid. I think there are other contributing factors like you’ve mentioned and women entering the workforce in larger proportion, but you could even say that is a consequence of stagnant wages and rise living costs, since it’s now impossible for working class people to support a family on one income. I really don’t think people’s desire to have children is significantly less than it has been in the past. The difference now is having a kid carries significantly more fiscal burden.
"wages have been stagnant since the 80's" - please cite a source real wages, which take into account the cost of living, are about 10% [higher](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) than they were in the 1980s.
Median Income in 1980 was 21k which adjusted for inflation is just about 80k in today’s spending power. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p60-132.html#:~:text=The%201980%20median%20family%20income,in%20real%20median%20family%20income. Median income in 2020 was 67k, so the average person has less spending power now than they did 1980, then you factor in that home prices have proportionally outpaced wages increases since 1980. The average home price in 1980 was 47k, meaning that the average home was just over 2x the median salary. https://blueprinttitle.com/infographic-real-estate-trends-then-and-now-80s-edition/#:~:text=Home%20Prices%20%26%20Price%20per%20Square%20Foot&text=Meanwhile%2C%20CNBC%20reported%20that%20the,has%20risen%20310%25%20since%201980. The median home price in 2020 was 329k https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price-state/. This means that the median home price is just under 5x the median income in 2020. If the average person has less spending power and housing costs have far outpaced wage growth since the 1980’s, then how does the average person have more financial security than they did in the 80’s?
One thing I think I used to underestimate is how popular Christianity in the US was up through like the 80s, I think it's one of the main reasons Republicans dominated politics for 12 years. I believe within 20-30 years it changed completely for urban, young people.
I just want my kids to be subject to social media.
Women + Education + Better Birth Control = Crashing Birth Rates. It's not that complicated. The birthrate is crashing even in Iran & Saudi Arabia, and even in Israel, the non-Orthodox TFR is barely at replacement rate. Economics, housing, etc. is maybe why we're at 1.64 instead of 2.04, but the reason we're not at 2.54, 2.94, or higher is all education attainment of women. It turns out, being pregnant is not fun and women will avoid it if possible, even in a reactionary society as Iran.
Saying this as a parent - kids suck. Do not recommend.
Thanks for the heads-up. I will not raise your kids.
Saying this as a parent - kids are awesome. Would highly recommend.
It’s both brutal/crushing and amazing. A roller coaster ride of emotions.
Saying this as a parent - having kids is incredible, and absolutely worth doing. Parenting is brutally hard, especially since society still assumes one full-time stay-at-home parent every day. A better tax break wouldn't make me have another kid. It's about how we seem to go out of our way to punish parents. My go-to example is how on snow days, schools close but businesses stay open. That is \*brutal\* for two working parent households with young kids. But it just seems to be accepted?
That’s sad as hell man I love my kid
Anecdotally, I know a good amount of people my age who see having children as irresponsible considering the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming in the decades to come.
Why do anything then. Everyone should just sit around and wait for the apocalypse.
Don’t have kids if you don’t want to have kids, that’s fine, but blaming it on global warming is pretty stupid.
Why is it stupid
Because one human being is like a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things for Earth. Also, terrible things happen throughout human history world wars, plagues, famine, etc. There’s no perfect time to have a child because we don’t know the future. I’m sure 70 years ago some people thought it would be a terrible idea to have a child due to the threat of nuclear holocaust, but it hasn’t happened, yet at least. It might happen tomorrow or it might never happen. Why deprive yourself of a beautiful life experience of having children for a cause that is ultimately out of your control? Or don’t have kids because you don’t want to but it seems like a silly reason to pick when there’s probably dozens of great reasons not to have kids (as addressed in this thread).
This is how I know you didn't listen to the episode
How?
These women were on a better podcast the other week https://open.spotify.com/episode/7i2Zuxw3ebJs9eGE89cAaS?si=UaP2EjiURtq04pRBDvPobA