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'Baby Bust': Why Fewer Young People Expect to Become Parents (2013)
- shae 3y agoI want children, I'll never be able to afford it.
- johnea 3y agoThe usual suspects: high cost of living, corp jobs sucking people dry, fear of uncertain future, all seem reasonably valid. But no one seems willing to suggest that maybe people today are just so self centered, that they don't want such a distraction from minecraft/halo/call of doodoo. If people can't manage to look out of the windshield of the car they're driving for more than 11 seconds at a stretch, because it's distracting from their cell phone usage, when their life is literally endangered, why would they choose to take on a lifelong commitment to another child besides themselves?
- flycaliguy 3y agoWith a 6 year old around you can play so much Minecraft your eyes will bleed.
- alx_the_new_guy 3y agoHot take time. Not having children, thus decreasing future population actually solves a decent amount of problems: Less pressure on the housing market, so maybe owning a home becomes actually feasible for regular people. Hopefully, prices come down enough so that renting stops being a thing. Lowers labor supply, thus increasing competition for it, especially, hopefully, in the lower salary bracket. Or maybe, even better, less of human life would be wasted mopping floors and what not, because hiring some sucker is cheaper than buying a robot or whatever. Less people means less pollution and general toll on the surroundins (less water used for irrigation, less overfishing and so on). Hopefully motivating people to get children includes making raising them suck less for those, who decide to have them. Less disposable lives means higher cost and lower probability of armed conflicts. Obviously it brings problems of it's own. Thing is, people not having children has probably more to do with some sort of societal crisis, than with better access to contraception, sex ed and what not. Population has exploded in the last 100 years, maybe it was a bubble of sorts all along, and now it's starting to burst? Anyways, fine by me. We either make living suck less, or make less people go through that. Seems like a win-win to me.
- Gigachad 3y agoLower population seems like the only way to solve most environment issues since convincing people to consume less and reduce their lifestyle is pretty much impossible.
- kthejoker2 3y agoDad of 4, feel a ton of empathy for double income families. Just today my (stay at home) wife cheerfully and idly answered, "That's my job!" to a breakfast request while I was reading this thread .... So that being said, barring childcare (and major health problems which are very rare), my kids are almost completely subsidized by the US government. They cost me (by my own estimate) about $30,000 in marginal non-discretionary spending - housing, clothing, food, transportation, medical visits, etc. (There's also lessons, vacations, arts and crafts, holiday gifts and the like, but those are highly variable and my own choice.) My tax burden without 4 dependents is nearly $28,000 higher than with them. Just anecdata (I also call major shenanigans on the "$1 million" needed to raise a kid" meme ... so far I've racked up 42 "kid-years" on ~ $1 million total net income And I'm doing a lot better financially than I was when I first became a dad....)
- immibis 3y agoIf you want something to happen, pay people to do it. If someone wants there to be more babies, they need to pay for them. At least the baby shortage will help with the teacher shortage.
- hirako2000 3y agoBut who's to pay?
- hirako2000 3y agoI observe there isn't a clear answer as to who's to pay. Let me help there. Everyone's to pay. But let's make that clear as the statement implied whoever is demanding higher demography would fund it, by some miracles. I'm not myself against funding the future of the civilization our lineage built. But we are already taxed significantly, more so to fund wars from what I see. already gave up properly financing a solid health care and education system.
- gedy 3y agoThey could just not tax (or refund previous year) new parents. This will never fly because blah blah reasons blah blah inequity, etc. But seems would help incentivize productive parents.
- al_borland 3y agoWhen certain people don’t need to pay taxes, someone else still has to pay. Either taxes need to go up for others, or the deficit grows accordingly, which is kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with.
- gedy 3y ago> the deficit grows accordingly, which is kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with. So, the same as today basically? It's been this way nearly my entire life and I'm middle aged. I’d personally rather fund more children and new families, then whatever the hell happened in the past five years with the deficit. More people means more future tax payers as well.
- revscat 3y agotl;dr: Money. People with moderate incomes can barely afford to house and feed themselves, even with a partner. Introduce a dependent child into the mix and the subsequent ~30% increase in fixed expenses and it is easy to see why fewer and fewer people are having children. Personally I wouldn’t want children because of the increasingly bleak outlook for humanity. Climate change is looking increasingly dire, and fascism is seeing a frightening upswing.
- pavlov 3y agoIt’s not that simple. Birth rates are also down in European countries where having a child is not a significant financial burden. Here’s an interesting recent interview on the topic with a leading Finnish demographer: (Financial Times, paywall) https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9401 https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9... Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high. Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare. But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere. “The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.” At the Family Federation, Rotkirch oversees a unique series of surveys, which ask young people not just how many children they are planning to have, but how many they would ideally like to have. Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’ life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”
- Longhanks 3y ago> European countries where having a child is not a significant financial burden I'm sorry, but which part of Europe would that be? People cannot afford a house and rents are going up like crazy, energy is expensive, taxes are high..?
- s1gnp0st 3y agoBiological systems where the cost of reproduction increases without an increase in the available resources cease to exist. How could it be otherwise? People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit.
- trgn 3y ago> People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit This is the true lesson of malthus' principle of population, not the narrow take that humans exhaust the planet and therefore doomed to extinction.
- finolex1 3y agoDoes not explain why more affluent families tend to have fewer children, or why TFR decreases as nations become wealthier.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoReproduction can be said to be incentivized in low-income groups as children can often participate in the tasks (typically manual labor) performed by the family. Meanwhile, in high-income groups, children take away resources that could be invested into the parents' career progression and wealth management. Of course low-income groups also suffer from lack of access to contraception, so it's not as straightforward, but that is the birds' eye overview of how it typically works.
- t-3 3y agoIf you have something to lose, you will be far more cautious about all aspects of life than someone with nothing. Sex is one of those primal drives that are easy to ignore when there are other things to pay attention to, and easy to indulge in without thinking much when everything has gone to shit. It's not exactly hard to understand that people with options will plan their lives much more intensively than those who don't know if they will be able to eat tomorrow.
- 3y ago
- Solvency 3y agoLess money, more microplastics. End of story.
- matthewaveryusa 3y agoBeing a parent is _punished_ in our society. It messes with your career growth in a dual income family, and for any metro with well paying jobs you're looking at ~3k/month daycare infant costs, down to 1.5k/month by age 5. And that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight. So if you're looking at income, for 2 kids, your break-even for stay-at-home is north of 100k per year. That's absurdly high. Combine that with infant kid rearing coinciding with the most expensive purchase of one's life (housing) and you see how impossiblly punishing it is for someone not making 200k+ in yearly income
- cma 3y agoHow many direct workers per infant are there in daycare, and what's the big source of overhead above that?
- billyhoffman 3y agoIn the US child-to-teacher ratios have maximum limits usually set and enforced at the State or municipal level. This ratio also varies by age level with lower child to teacher ratios for infants than for toddlers. In Georgia the ratio is 6:1 for infants. However there is a national daycare certification group NAEYC which has stricter ratios. The daycare where my kids went was NAEYC certified and the ratio was 4:1 for infants.
- FireBeyond 3y ago> In the US child-to-teacher ratios have maximum limits usually set and enforced at the State or municipal level. As someone who has a partner who spent years working in a wide variety of childcare (from "high end" to "low end"), these ratios are _routinely_ ignored. There's also significant pressure to come in when sick. She was very sick - "Well, good thing there's a bathroom in your room, huh?" On the rare occasions they really couldn't meet staffing levels and didn't open for the day? Congratulations, everyone gets the day off! Unpaid, of course! Why, yes, we're still billing families the normal weekly/monthly rate...
- 3y ago
- geenat 3y agoCost of housing
- angmarsbane 3y agoIn the USA there are affordable 55+ no kids allowed housing developments near job centers. Why can’t we build or subsidize similar developments for families with kids.
- smcl 3y agoI mean, cost of many things but yeah housing is an enormous factor. If you're not certain you can settle down somewhere with enough room to have a family (or even to live on your own, in some cases) you're going to put off having one, sometimes indefinitely.
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoCost of literally everything. Housing, food, health insurance, education, child care, etc... all while wages are stagnant. Our society is sick and the people in charge are wildly out of touch with the reality most people face.
- acdha 3y agoHousing is the biggest one here, though, because it hits in two key ways: people need bigger houses to have kids but also they need childcare, and the cost of real estate makes that brutal because people need daycare to be close enough to be practical travel-wise and it’s a labor-intensive business without great economies of scale so all of the workers also need to be able to make rent in the area. This is a classic area where government support would make a huge difference: don’t have a bunch of small businesses competing with Starbucks on rent, and have things like healthcare paid for out of a huge pool of employees.
- jnwatson 3y agoPlus folks are graduating with a lot more debt.
- freefaler 3y ago
- fnordpiglet 3y agoNote this article is 11 years old. Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.
- CogitoCogito 3y agoI'm 38 and have had the opposite experience. Of all the friends I remember saying they wouldn't have kids, I don't think any of them changed their tune. I do have friends who used to say they wanted kids, but probably never will.
- hotpotamus 3y agoIn those 11 years fertility has fallen near universally. Speaking as a millennial, I never saw my career as a means towards changing the world or some life mission driven by passion; I just wanted to find stable employment to hopefully find some financial security and keep my ass in health insurance (I foolishly contracted a childhood condition that left me somewhat disabled). Graduating into the great recession and trying to stay on the treadmill of employment as I flee one layoff or another hasn't left much space in life for a lot else. I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoExcept the correlate isn’t as people propose here poverty but wealth, as wealth increased fertility has decreased. I would note that having kids doesn’t mean having a brood like people did in the past. One or two children is by far the norm in my cohort and I have one. Growing up families were not uncommon with 4-6 kids, now it’s unheard of. I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.
- verticalscaler 3y ago[flagged]
- tombert 3y agoI remember as a kid when I first had the realization that I do have to have my own kids when I'm a grownup, and from that day decided that I don't want to have kids. When I was 25 (about 8 years ago) I got a vasectomy and I haven't had any regrets yet. I'm not one of those toxic "Child-free" douchebags on Reddit [1]; I do like kids, I enjoy playing with my nieces and nephew, but I also really like having money and less responsibility. It's absurdly expensive to raise kids, especially before they're school age, and I spent a lot of 2023 unemployed. I am very happy that I didn't have to worry about an infant while also looking for a job. [1] I'm sure not all of them are bad but what I saw was calling kids "cum goblins" and the like, acting like they're some kind of blight on the world.
- _fat_santa 3y agoI can't speak for others but at least for me, I have an irrational desire for a family. I'm well aware of the costs, the setbacks to your career and other penalties but at the end of the day my attitude is: "I don't give a shit, I want a family"
- matt3D 3y agoOdd to hear you describe it as irrational.
- bobim 3y agoI had the same feeling, once meeting the right person. You can’t help when it happens.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoWell, if it's rational, what is the rationale?
- mmh0000 3y agoHumans are social animals, and evolution has conditioned us to reap significant happiness and wellness rewards from our offspring. I can't speak for anyone besides myself, but my anecdote is: I was a DINK (Dual-Income; No Kids) for a long time. Both the wife and I earned well. I thought I didn't want kids (I didn't not want kids either). Wife got preggers, she quit her job to be a SAHM. This cut our household income in half. We have to live on a strict budget now, but, given the option, I would never want more money and fewer kids. I want many more kids.
- mkl95 3y agoI bought my first apartment in my mid twenties, like my parents did. Let's measure it in Porsches. Their place was newer than mine and cost them less than a run down Porsche. My tiny apartment cost me about the same as a new 911 with multiple extras.
- Pamar 3y agoI was born in the early '60s and I have no children. Economical concerns are surely part of the equation but I also suspect that in Western Culture adults tend to have a more individualistic stance and this could also be a factor. What I mean is: as soon as we start getting some sort of economic independence we tend to focus on our own hobbies, travels, interests. Those of us who are lucky enough in being in a long lasting relationship would hopefully do this together... but we are always aware that the moment a child enters our life, we can forget most of it, at least for a decade.
- ericd 3y agoI feel like this is a common misconception about having kids, that your life somehow ends, and you have to give up everything you care about in favor of them. We’ve been traveling with our kids since the first was 4 months old, and it’s been great fun introducing them to our hobbies, and doing them with them. Seeing them pick this stuff up and in some ways surpass us is incredibly gratifying.
- nunez 3y agoi'm not a parent, but from observing the parents i know, i think you're incredibly lucky to be able to travel with your child and have it not be a burden. the norm seems to be "add an hour and hundreds of dollars for every activity you do with kids, and add unbounded levels of stress if you're the mom"
- ericd 3y agoWe’re certainly very lucky in many ways, but besides the financial aspect, a lot of it is just practicing it with the kids and getting them used to it, which is the case with many other things in their lives, and part of it is changing our own expectations about traveling. We go a lot slower than we used to, with more and longer stops on road trips, and give ourselves a lot more time/wiggle room at each place. If we need to drive 9 hours, we might break that into three days, and visit places that are about 3 hours apart. If we fly somewhere and it’s long, we try to go to immediately go to a hotel as close as possible to the airport so that we can all conk out if we need to. When we’re not stressed about timetables, it’s much easier for us all to have a good time. We don’t spend so much of our time at the destination, but that’s fine, there’s lots of cool stuff to see on the way, generally. We keep our schedule at the destination similarly sparse. Also, we take turns with everything, it’s not on mom. Don’t know how she’d handle that on her own. It takes work and energy, and we do some things differently than we used to, we’ve had to relearn some things, but it’s not putting the fun parts of life on pause for 10 years. You adapt, and still have a lot of fun, and you get to see these little people learn and grow, which is amazing. Ours are in a pun-making phase, which is hilarious and terrible.
- throwaway49849 3y ago>Friedman: One of the pieces of what I see as good news in this story is that more people, women and men, are willing and able to say, “I don’t want to have children.” For women especially, I see this as a kind of social progress in human evolution. In every generation prior to the current one, women have been normatively sanctioned to think of themselves as mothers. There’s almost a mindless march into motherhood throughout history. That question hasn’t really been raised. Today, young women are saying, “I don’t feel a need to do that.” Mr. Friedman should interview the women after their biological window has closed, and see if there answers have changed. Not doing so is ignoring the full picture of how we conceptualize an idea like having children over the course of our entire lives.
- jeffrallen 3y agoAs a parent of 3 in Switzerland, I always laugh (sadly) at these threads. Cost of daycare? Make a sliding scale. Cost of housing? Accept smaller living space, but count on your community to give you other safe, comfortable and fun public spaces. Pay parents to have kids? Yup (1500 at birth, 200 a month until school is done, even up to bachelor degree). Cost of education? Free public universities. If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoAnd yet what is Switzerland’s birth rate? 1.46 is better than South Korea, but not as good as the USA’s 1.64. > If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them. So what is Switzerland doing wrong that it needs to fix so it can do better than the USA at least?
- instagib 3y agohttps://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati... Immigration. Not necessarily wrong but why some countries have higher birth rates. Subsidize current citizens costs for more natural born citizens. More people/workers - immigration.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoSwitzerland has more immigrants than the USA in a per capita basis, so by that reasoning, should have a higher birth rate, not lower. Switzerland also admits plenty of immigrants from high birth rate countries (Africa, the Middle East).
- instagib 3y agoLots of fun info on the demographics between the two and many others but both are below the 2.1 replacement fertility rate. Maybe this would be a better link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replacement_rates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replace... I was trying to answer to the reply and not denigrate Switzerland in any way. Expensive travel magnets though.
- westbywest 3y agoThe increasingly toxic politics (arguably by design) emerging around school board elections is very recent addition to disincentives. I live in a Midwest city where suburban school districts that previously wooed young professionals away from urban core now frequently feature nasty culture war fights, book banning, etc. It's notable for impacting generally wealthier households that could bear the expense of relocating to suburban municipalities with higher cost of living/taxes to access better schools.
- thriftwy 3y agoI wonder why all of troublemakers are not ejected from the system? You would think any "komsomol" types would be flushed by democratic system whereas they would be retained in assignments based system. Are there parents who genuinely want culture wars / book banning types deciding how their children study?
- ryandrake 3y agoIncreasingly, the troublemakers are gaining overwhelming support from the electorate. We used to rely on the fact that the belligerent, crazy, culture wars / book burning folks were a tiny minority, kept powerless by the democratic system. As their numbers grow, the democratic system starts to work for them. Many places (at least in the USA) have crossed the rubicon demographic wise, and the inmates are now running the asylum.
- westbywest 3y agoAn underlying motivation to this new power-mongering in school district politics is that education is typically the 2nd largest budget item in most US states. The "troublemakers" despite their theatrics also as a category tend to overwhelmingly support schemes that divert education funds to private entities, e.g. vouchers, tax-credit scholarships.
- thriftwy 3y agoSo instead of helping the vulnerable groups get education, they will try to divert as much funds as possible from that goal? I alao thought that getting education outside of public one-size-fits-all school was a conservative thing (religious schools, private schools) - especially if enabled by a voucher. Is that is what politics are about?
- surajrmal 3y agoAnecdotally, I've noticed that it has a lot to do with women having the sense of security and freedom to say they don't want children. About half of the women in my friend group do not want children despite their husbands wanting them. It has life long physical side effects on women, pregnancy isn't very fun, giving birth can be traumatic and painful, and there are all too many societal expectations placed on the mom. Almost every parenting book I read seemed to be assuming only the mom would read the book. Networking with other parents seems to need to occur primarily through moms, breastfeeding is endlessly pushed and shifts a great deal of the work required early in the child's life onto the mother, possibly carrying over into habits that are maintained afterwards. People don't even talk about any of these things beforehand, but I'd honestly be surprised if most women would want children after learning about these things. This isn't to mention the fact that having children completely upends your time. Hobbies and free time are seldom available after children. This affects both parents, and it feels like people really don't want to give these things up these days. Really, short of parents constantly pushing you to have kids, there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation to have kids.
- nunez 3y agoall of this was a big driving factor behind my decision to not have children. couldn't have said it better myself. (i'm a 36yo male.)
- thriftwy 3y agoI wonder why the same set of people would be happy for years of unpaid and costly education, to get a job with overtime expectations and have significant motivation for career growth. At least children will be yours. Whatever you do on your job will belong to somebody else. Somebody else is going to reap all that career growth of yours. You will get an insignificant amount of money for the effort, that you will be forced to spend on way overpriced things.
- immibis 3y agoPeople aren't choosing to work for free rather than having children. They're choosing to work more now to either have more stuff now or work less later.