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It's Not Just You. No One Wants Kids Anymore [video]

41 points by Rinzler89 2y ago

foobarkey 2y ago
I want kids, probably 3, working on it
- gizajob 2y ago
  I want kids too. I already have one who is 16 that I don’t have a very good relationship but I’d love to have a family where I could be a parent this time around. Didn’t really get to the first time.
  - ChumpGPT 2y ago
    Never to late to fix things.
    - gizajob 2y ago
      Thanks! Maybe in coming years the situation with my daughter will improve but I’m pretty certain I’m not going to be having any more children, even if I’d like that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- joak 2y ago
  I already have kids, love them, happy to have more. My kids, others kids make me happy. Is this generation going to have a better life than the previous ones? I think so. I don't understand too frequent self defeating doomism.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  We stopped at 2 mainly because the education costs would have been very high, and you need a special car once you get to 3
  - abhiyerra 2y ago
    Not ready for the minivan lifestyle?
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
      I don't want to own a car at all. I like using public transit and car sharing occasionally. Minivans are available for car sharing, but are way more rare
  - atmavatar 2y ago
    That depends on how much trunk space you have ;)
xkbarkar 2y ago
My take is a combination of factors - Decreased fertility ( Obesity maybe? ) - Cost of housing. - Children in the west are now overprotected little dictators and parents are no longer allowed to be humans with their own needs. Side rant: I just saw a linkedin post with a woman being flamed for choosing not not attend childs first day of school because she had an important work event to attend to. Father attended, not mother. Mother thus declared incompetent child abuser. I would never choose to have a child today. Mine are born just two seconds before the western world turned insane on parental demands. And kids are assholes. I love mine, but small children are generally selfish, oppurtunistic douchebags. Seing what my poor younger collegues go through today I would absolutely abstain from having any. Living on the edge of financial ruin and sleep depravation to pay half my income for a child that can threaten to call the social sevices on you for forcing them to bicycle to school instead of being driven by car is an easy choice not to make. Oddly specific story is a danish one from a collegue. They have a kids emergency phone or something in Denmark that is supposed to be used for abused children to alarm authorities of violence etc. Said collegue was reported, by their 11 year old, for failing to drive the kid to school and giving them bicycles instead. To add insult to injury, its an expensive private school they attend and denmark is a bicycle country. The authorities of course just dismissed the complaint and nothing ever happened. Kid had to bicycle. They have to investigate according to law though. And file a report. Sorry long rant. I feel genuinly sorry for young people trying to start a family. Bringing a child to the western world demands double phds in child psychiatry and Kardashian money.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  Why are people talking about their kids on LinkedIn? Also if I tried something like that with my mom I wouldn't see daylight for a year.
- nytesky 2y ago
  I think my kids are older than, yours as they are applying to college. My impression is that kids have always been terrible, and even my teen is self-involved and arrogant and short tempered with siblings despite all external perspectives are that they are a quite decent and competent human. Fertility is dropping, maybe it’s a factor, but being centered in developed nations it’s just the universal problem for 20 years: housing. Housing costs outstripped income since the 90s, and post pandemic and post inflation busting interest rates, providing the type of stable life to your kids seems unattainable. With kids you need bigger housing, you need a bigger car or a car at all, you need that housing to be some place safe and probably short distance from good schools. Even if you can afford that, which we can barely manage, than all our cash goes into housing, and there is less for retirement and college funds. Yes, people can accept cramped conditions or take a gamble their kids won’t be impact by a gritty neighborhood gang or what not, but people just decide to wait, hope for better fortunes, and then whoops no babies anymore.
anononaut 2y ago
It's a tragedy in slow motion. Symptom or cause, this will make the next decades very bleak.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Almost everything is based on infinite growth and an increasing amount of consumers/taxpayers. Breaking the ponzi scheme now is as good as breaking it in 50 years
  - carlmr 2y ago
    Exactly on point. The more we grow the bigger the future catastrophe.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Arguably better, since the ponzi scheme runs on under-constrained fossil fuel extraction and exhaustion that is both unsustainable and risks collapsing the planetary biosphere. The sooner we stop assuming this planet can support unlimited human beings, the better.
whatnotests2 2y ago
I want kids, but would not raise them in America.
GoToRO 2y ago
When rich people fire tens of thousands of workers without any repercusion, nobody wants to have kids?
- sfmz 2y ago
  Birth rates are also low in European countries with strong worker protections.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Even though there is a good social safety net and worker protections, kids are still relatively expensive in both time and money. Nobody _wants_ to neglect their kid because their job requires 10-12 hours of their time per day. Nobody wants their kid to not have the things they want because they can't afford it. There still are people who literally YOLO kids and somehow make do, others consider and wait for The Best Time and poof they're 40 and in line for IVF.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Layoffs still happen in Europe too.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  There have been tyrants through the ages who have killed tens of thousands of people without repercussion and the Survivors still had kids..
  - GoToRO 2y ago
    I lived under such a tyrant and what people don't realize it's just how peaceful it is. Sure, economically the whole country was shit and you were not allowed to say the tyrant was a tyrant, but everything else was butter smooth. Now I feel it's too much noise but also actual randomness (now we hire, now we fire) and it's hard to have any real stability.
- the_optimist 2y ago
  Thousands of years of more severe precedent challenges have been overcome. You are stronger than you think. The light you seek is within you.
JohnFen 2y ago
I love my kids, but I do often look at the state of things and wonder if having them was doing them a disservice.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I too love my kids, and would not make the choice again. Timing is everything, and this is not a macro favorable to humans and parenting. I now do whatever I can to help people who don't want kids not have them. The cost of failure is simply too high. To those who want them, all I can say is "You're on your own, no one is coming to save you. I wish you luck, but don't be shocked when the outcome goes south." From this video's Youtube comments: “Governments aren’t trying to create self actualized, happy, positive individuals. They’re trying to create meat for the grinder.” Rational actors are making rational decisions based on the environment they are operating in and their options available.
cafard 2y ago
Really? I see a fair number of small children in my neighborhood, aged from less than a year on up. If we grant that anymore extends back as much as six years, I'd say that quite a few grownups haven't got the message.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  I wonder if there's data on this so we don't need to rely on neighborhood vibes...
- burner_flameon 2y ago
  No, quite a few grownups _in your neighborhood_ haven't gotten the message. The reasons why your neighbors may not be a representative sample of the 8-billion-ish humans on Earth are left as an exercise for the reader.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  I am begging you people to understand how the context of words informs whether they're intended to be taken literally or figuratively.
seanw444 2y ago
Had my first kid this year. Will definitely be having more. Does it require a less comfy and selfish lifestyle? Definitely. I'll get to my deathbed and regret not having a family of my own to enjoy time with. Pro tip: it's always been "the wrong time" to have kids. It never gets good enough to be easy.
- nashashmi 2y ago
  > the wrong time Would you consider lack of marriage stability as a reason to not have kids yet?
  - thisOtterBeGood 2y ago
    No. We have two kids and have been agreeing on a third. There are no rational arguments for another child: We will sacrifice sleep, money, self-entertainment. It always results in more work for parents.
  - benterix 2y ago
    Definitely. I believe most people would see the "wrong time" as lack of financial stability. Not being able to depend on a partner is a recipe for a broken family and not a very happy lifer for the child (first-hand experience).
  - seanw444 2y ago
    Yeah. I was mostly directing that towards the "the world is going to shit" crowd. I'm also a part of that crowd, but it irks me when people think we're in a unique situation. The world's always been going to shit. It goes to shit in rather short cycles.
    - trilbyglens 2y ago
      previous "going to shit" cycles didn't have the possibility of ending the habitable era of our planet.
      - 2y ago
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
I am 40 and have three children that are teenagers. They are the most important part of my life, have been transformative in my life and would do it over in a second. I did zero family planning because I was in a position where having a child was just assumed as part of life and I could afford it (most can). I wasn’t pressured or forced by my community to, but I didn’t actively try to prevent it once I was married. What I describe above was basically the way people lived with respect to “family planning” since all biological history unto the last few hundred years - namely they didn’t do any The world has changed in the last 100 years - likely for the better - in that we’re now intentional and forceful about consentful sex, accessible birth control, accessible abortion etc…such that fertility isn’t just taken for granted and is fully in the hands (ideally) of the birth mother. The result is that most of my peers on the other hand either have one or zero kids. Why? Cause they actively tried not to have kids. Now the ones who want them are struggling with IVF or HRT etc… and having even one is a blessing. It’s a new world and all the old assumptions about human life don’t hold because we’ve been so successful in building systems and controls for what we’re previously magical, mystical processes.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  I'm 35 with two children and completely agree with you. The sad state of things is that is not assumed anymore you will have children (the opposite). For example, there used to be many family movies (movies that both adults and children could enjoy), but now I can't find many. There are kids movies or adults movies, but family movies are more rare. None of my friends in 2 countries had children (I'm an immigrant). That's shocking, all families with children I had to meet after I had them. Anyway lucky services for families are strong and we can enjoy the time together, but my prospective growing up was to share this also with my friends, so the realization it wouldn't be the case was sad. All of them are losing so much.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  This is worded in a way that is a little confusing to me. "Not planning" to have children because "having a child was just assumed", and just letting it happen whenever it happens, is still an explicit plan to have children, regardless of whether it falls under the umbrella of "family planning" as a formal term. Now, people are explicitly deciding not to have children. This would be true regardless of how actively or inactively people used to approach child-having.
ajma 2y ago
In my tech crowd, I often have the most kids (four). Sometimes I meet others with 4 but it's pretty rare. I have a non-tech group of friends. With four, I'm probably more average.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  where do you live? Israel or Kazakhstan? 4 kids per family as 'average' is almost unheard of in the industrialized world
josefritzishere 2y ago
There are two and only two ways to increase population. The first is via birthrate, (either more people having kids, or having mroe kids per couple) The second is immigration. Immigration can increase the population of available workers now, birthrate obviously has a delay. I expect both political parties in the US will find a rationale to become much more permissive about immigration. the alternative is not good.
ChumpGPT 2y ago
Kids are absolutely amazing. The more time parents invest in them, the more amazing they are. It's a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  It's the most fulfilling work of my life. No career can get close to how impactful it is. It's also a really effective way to really learn that life isn't about you. Not the only way, of course, but a very good one.
TeeMassive 2y ago
The primary factor of people not starting families is the disappearance of blue collar working class jobs.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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readthenotes1 2y ago
This reminds me of the recent hacker News article talking about the overcrowded rat experiment, where the rats also chose not to have children
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  They didn't "choose" it. Their behavior malfunctioned because their conditions made them neurotic. And that behavior persisted even after it was no longer overcrowded due to die-off, probably because of cultural transmission: females who grew to maturity in that environment conditioned what offspring they did have to have those same behaviors regardless of crowding or lack thereof. In the 1990s, I remember being bombarded with messages that "adoption was just as good as having your own child". In high school by teachers, when there was opportunity. From television and media. We've been conditioned too. I won't call it deliberate, but even if it were inadvertent would it matter? No words even have to be said, if you're a young child and they send you to school with other young children, and everyone you know is an only child, what do you grow up to think is the correct number of children for adults to have? The simple answer is "one", but there's an implicit "or zero" that should be tacked on. The children see these "zeros" too, when they notice the adults around them are childless. Those children don't grow up and choose not to any more than the rats chose not to.
shadowgovt 2y ago
Worth highlighting in this video is the discovery in the data by the Economist that more than half of the drop in the US fertility rate is from women aged 15-19 choosing to not have children in that age range. The significant birthrate drop turns out to be an unexpected consequence of a societal goal that various moral actors in the US had been working towards for decades.
- Chris2048 2y ago
  The commenter describes them as a "backbone", but I'm a little sceptical - Do we really want an economy propped up by unplanned births, and the unwilling, difficult labour of single parents? Also, they never correlate with actual future tax contributions vs use of services, rendering the raw birthrate comparison meaningless..
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Sort of a hallmark of American cognitive dissonance about their place in the global economy is the disconnect between the reality on the ground of how their country makes money and what they want the truth of that story to be. In the modern era for example, we know that American agriculture is basically backstopped by undocumented and underdocumented labor of immigrant workers. Successful 100% enforcement of immigration law and border security would result in a food crisis due to a lack of hands to pick the harvest (because farm incomes are not sustainable paying a standard American living wage). Illegal immigration is currently the backbone of the American agricultural economy, and it's an inconvenient truth that Americans like to ignore.
dnel 2y ago
Have two kids, I always wanted a family around me and I love having them but I don't blame people for making other choices, it is very hard. We were 34 when we had our firstborn, 38 for 2nd, waiting to be financially stable enough, be on the housing ladder etc, but now one of my wife's parents is elderly, the other is dead, one of mine is still working due to delayed state pension age, and the other is raising step grand-kids. Siblings emmigrated and live thousands of miles away so we're on our own in a country that does very little to help parents with astronomical childcare costs, some of the most expensive in Europe. It's a system set up to prevent the next generation from existing, while at the same time the country that is literally rioting against the immigration needed to plug the gap. Sure, call it the "far right" but the sentiments are muttered by many more moderate voices. I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  Immigration doesn't plug the gap, it causes the costs to rise that people complain is the reason for them not having or wanting children. I don't particularly believe that high costs of living are the real reason, seems more like a rationalization to me (else we'd see number of children go smoothly up with higher income, and we don't really see that). But it does seem to be the popular response. Does immigration cause the lower fertility, or does lower fertility cause the immigration? Why can't it be both, death spiral style?
  - azemetre 2y ago
    How do you square this opinion with countries like South Korea or Japan, two of which both have extremely low immigration and low fertility? I think the, more obvious IMO, answer is that as a species we no longer have an optimistic vision of the future. Income inequality is rising around the world and in certain elitist circles there are serious discussions about creating a neo-aristocracy/neo-feudalism. Where are the stories about bettering ourselves? Why does it feel like we have to fight the fights of our ancestors to demand the same rights that they bled for? It's depressing and collectively I think the vast majority of us recognize this and feel powerless. People want to fight climate change, but a handful of individuals are able to stop all progress? People want to usher in new civil rights, but now we have to continue to fight for the same rights previous peoples had? People want better welfare programs, but we have to fight to return to previous tax structures that enabled this decades ago? How can you tell an optimistic vision of the future when people are actively fighting, and winning, against it?
techdmn 2y ago
Also, the defect rate on children is surprisingly high, around 3% if memory serves. As the parent of a child with disabilities, my experience has been one of complete devastation. I'm not in a good enough place to have a conversation about this, but also feel an obligation to others in a similar position not to be invisible.
- nativespecies 2y ago
  My nephew is severely autistic. My brother and his wife struggle mightily and my hat is off to him. I don’t have the strength to do something like that, so I add it as another reason children are not for me.
nine_zeros 2y ago
I dunno - can I have some protection of income when management decides to fire me because I am taking care of my pregnant wife? Can my wife also have pregnancy protection? As a society, can we protect humans from capitalistic predators who will literally cut off food from your table because some KPI is temporarily not met?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  The video touches on that, in that birth rates are low even in countries where all those protections exist so it's not just that.
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    Not all countries with protection have similar protection. Most countries with protection have patchwork laws that are easily broken. Even the US has laws that pregnant people cannot be discriminated against but they face retaliation and discrimination by citing other means - a patchwork law with no teeth.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      Sure, in theory yes nothing written in law is ever 100% secure unless you have an army of well paid lawyers to protect you, but moving the goal posts like this can go on forever. The reality is even countries with iron clad protections they are also having less kids. So that's not the only factor.
      - nine_zeros 2y ago
        Yes, the ask is for ironclad societal-benefit laws with teeth. Not lip service laws.
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        And even when those exist birthrates are still low. Look at Scandinavian/Nordic European countries.
lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
The future belongs to those who show up for it. If you don't have kids, that means the future is going to belong to children raised by far right radical parents (since those are most of the people who are choosing to have children these days). Do you really want the future of the country decided by people who were raised with those values?
- Gud 2y ago
  In my experience, people have very different opinions from their parents.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  I've never even felt like the present belonged to me now matter how much I showed up; I know for sure the future doesn't, and frankly I've found more peace since I've accepted that.
rich_sasha 2y ago
I wonder what the endgame is. What will happen in 20 years time? One option is that immigrants will pick up the baton. Old childless people might complain about immigrants from XYZ yet pay them for support. Perhaps other jobs will likewise be filled by people emigrating from poorer countries. Another is the same, but the economic growth will slow in these aging societies, and the rich aging countries will turn into poor old countries, without the means to attract immigrants. For different reasons, but the UK labour market is really struggling, as since Brexit it is harder to attract migrant workers in sought after professions. Why should you go do menial jobs in the US if India or Vietnam or Albania is booming, fuelled by healthy demographics, and the US is getting poorer? These now-old countries will sell off their economy for support, basically, a bit how the UK has been selling off bits of it to sustain cash balances. Or go without young hands to do the work, and implode in slow motion. Maybe having children will again become net positive. But if course the lead time on productive humans from scratch is very long.
amriksohata 2y ago
He said something about young single women are really important to society because the under 19s are no longer having children. THis is somewhat a conflation. Under 19s , 30-40 years ago were probably less likely to be single mums. Thats not to say they did not exist, but there were far fewer.
amriksohata 2y ago
He also missed things like divorce laws which now massively favour women, why would a man get married and want to settle and have kids, if half or more is taken away of his castle, his kids and everything he owns.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
I have 2 older teenagers, we live in a very comfortable suburb of Paris, top schools etc. If not for my wife's MS we would have had two more because it was fun, we can afford it and we are in a safe place with a bright future for the kids. I had a discussion with my kids about them having children. They do not want any because of the state of the world. I was with them and told them that if I was in their shoes, knowing how great having kids is - I would not have any either. I simply would not want them to live in the world I will leave behind.
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  This is by far the best time to be alive for any human in history.
  - illiac786 2y ago
    I think the best time was maybe a decade ago, it’s going downward and the outlook is bad. Humans cannot deal well with decline/degradation, it’s very painful to us. Like having a little less money every month – so much worse than having much less money suddenly and then slowly more every month again, even if the total amount of money is the same.
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    Right now, yes. My hypothetical grand-children would be 30 around 2060. With the disastrous predictions for basically everything, and especially climate, I would not to be at my peak at that time.
    - baggy_trough 2y ago
      I bet you’re wrong.
      - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
        Maybe. I would not bet on the well-being of my children.
abhiyerra 2y ago
I had a son in the last year. I wanted to be a young dad around 26 but had him at 36. The turning point to having him was when my wife’s friends started having kids. After having a kid she realized how much we love having him. But a delay in that is that the 20s are a critical period for both sexes to built their career. Even though I wanted to be a young dad I did not want her to give up her career over it. Even as a dad who tries to take on a bunch of workload the amount of work that goes to the mother is just significantly higher than the dad. But as a corollary to delaying having kids is that biologically we are not made to have kids so late and my wife and her friends have all experienced complications dues to it.

41 points by Rinzler89 2y ago

foobarkey 2y ago

I want kids, probably 3, working on it

gizajob 2y ago
I want kids too. I already have one who is 16 that I don’t have a very good relationship but I’d love to have a family where I could be a parent this time around. Didn’t really get to the first time.
- ChumpGPT 2y ago
  Never to late to fix things.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Thanks! Maybe in coming years the situation with my daughter will improve but I’m pretty certain I’m not going to be having any more children, even if I’d like that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
joak 2y ago
I already have kids, love them, happy to have more. My kids, others kids make me happy. Is this generation going to have a better life than the previous ones? I think so. I don't understand too frequent self defeating doomism.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
We stopped at 2 mainly because the education costs would have been very high, and you need a special car once you get to 3
- abhiyerra 2y ago
  Not ready for the minivan lifestyle?
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
    I don't want to own a car at all. I like using public transit and car sharing occasionally. Minivans are available for car sharing, but are way more rare
- atmavatar 2y ago
  That depends on how much trunk space you have ;)

xkbarkar 2y ago

My take is a combination of factors - Decreased fertility ( Obesity maybe? ) - Cost of housing. - Children in the west are now overprotected little dictators and parents are no longer allowed to be humans with their own needs. Side rant: I just saw a linkedin post with a woman being flamed for choosing not not attend childs first day of school because she had an important work event to attend to. Father attended, not mother. Mother thus declared incompetent child abuser. I would never choose to have a child today. Mine are born just two seconds before the western world turned insane on parental demands. And kids are assholes. I love mine, but small children are generally selfish, oppurtunistic douchebags. Seing what my poor younger collegues go through today I would absolutely abstain from having any. Living on the edge of financial ruin and sleep depravation to pay half my income for a child that can threaten to call the social sevices on you for forcing them to bicycle to school instead of being driven by car is an easy choice not to make. Oddly specific story is a danish one from a collegue. They have a kids emergency phone or something in Denmark that is supposed to be used for abused children to alarm authorities of violence etc. Said collegue was reported, by their 11 year old, for failing to drive the kid to school and giving them bicycles instead. To add insult to injury, its an expensive private school they attend and denmark is a bicycle country. The authorities of course just dismissed the complaint and nothing ever happened. Kid had to bicycle. They have to investigate according to law though. And file a report. Sorry long rant. I feel genuinly sorry for young people trying to start a family. Bringing a child to the western world demands double phds in child psychiatry and Kardashian money.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
Why are people talking about their kids on LinkedIn? Also if I tried something like that with my mom I wouldn't see daylight for a year.
nytesky 2y ago
I think my kids are older than, yours as they are applying to college. My impression is that kids have always been terrible, and even my teen is self-involved and arrogant and short tempered with siblings despite all external perspectives are that they are a quite decent and competent human. Fertility is dropping, maybe it’s a factor, but being centered in developed nations it’s just the universal problem for 20 years: housing. Housing costs outstripped income since the 90s, and post pandemic and post inflation busting interest rates, providing the type of stable life to your kids seems unattainable. With kids you need bigger housing, you need a bigger car or a car at all, you need that housing to be some place safe and probably short distance from good schools. Even if you can afford that, which we can barely manage, than all our cash goes into housing, and there is less for retirement and college funds. Yes, people can accept cramped conditions or take a gamble their kids won’t be impact by a gritty neighborhood gang or what not, but people just decide to wait, hope for better fortunes, and then whoops no babies anymore.

anononaut 2y ago

It's a tragedy in slow motion. Symptom or cause, this will make the next decades very bleak.

lm28469 2y ago
Almost everything is based on infinite growth and an increasing amount of consumers/taxpayers. Breaking the ponzi scheme now is as good as breaking it in 50 years
- carlmr 2y ago
  Exactly on point. The more we grow the bigger the future catastrophe.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Arguably better, since the ponzi scheme runs on under-constrained fossil fuel extraction and exhaustion that is both unsustainable and risks collapsing the planetary biosphere. The sooner we stop assuming this planet can support unlimited human beings, the better.

whatnotests2 2y ago

I want kids, but would not raise them in America.

GoToRO 2y ago

When rich people fire tens of thousands of workers without any repercusion, nobody wants to have kids?

sfmz 2y ago
Birth rates are also low in European countries with strong worker protections.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Even though there is a good social safety net and worker protections, kids are still relatively expensive in both time and money. Nobody _wants_ to neglect their kid because their job requires 10-12 hours of their time per day. Nobody wants their kid to not have the things they want because they can't afford it. There still are people who literally YOLO kids and somehow make do, others consider and wait for The Best Time and poof they're 40 and in line for IVF.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Layoffs still happen in Europe too.
readthenotes1 2y ago
There have been tyrants through the ages who have killed tens of thousands of people without repercussion and the Survivors still had kids..
- GoToRO 2y ago
  I lived under such a tyrant and what people don't realize it's just how peaceful it is. Sure, economically the whole country was shit and you were not allowed to say the tyrant was a tyrant, but everything else was butter smooth. Now I feel it's too much noise but also actual randomness (now we hire, now we fire) and it's hard to have any real stability.
the_optimist 2y ago
Thousands of years of more severe precedent challenges have been overcome. You are stronger than you think. The light you seek is within you.

JohnFen 2y ago

I love my kids, but I do often look at the state of things and wonder if having them was doing them a disservice.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
I too love my kids, and would not make the choice again. Timing is everything, and this is not a macro favorable to humans and parenting. I now do whatever I can to help people who don't want kids not have them. The cost of failure is simply too high. To those who want them, all I can say is "You're on your own, no one is coming to save you. I wish you luck, but don't be shocked when the outcome goes south." From this video's Youtube comments: “Governments aren’t trying to create self actualized, happy, positive individuals. They’re trying to create meat for the grinder.” Rational actors are making rational decisions based on the environment they are operating in and their options available.

cafard 2y ago

Really? I see a fair number of small children in my neighborhood, aged from less than a year on up. If we grant that anymore extends back as much as six years, I'd say that quite a few grownups haven't got the message.

llamaimperative 2y ago
I wonder if there's data on this so we don't need to rely on neighborhood vibes...
burner_flameon 2y ago
No, quite a few grownups _in your neighborhood_ haven't gotten the message. The reasons why your neighbors may not be a representative sample of the 8-billion-ish humans on Earth are left as an exercise for the reader.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
I am begging you people to understand how the context of words informs whether they're intended to be taken literally or figuratively.

seanw444 2y ago

Had my first kid this year. Will definitely be having more. Does it require a less comfy and selfish lifestyle? Definitely. I'll get to my deathbed and regret not having a family of my own to enjoy time with. Pro tip: it's always been "the wrong time" to have kids. It never gets good enough to be easy.

nashashmi 2y ago
> the wrong time Would you consider lack of marriage stability as a reason to not have kids yet?
- thisOtterBeGood 2y ago
  No. We have two kids and have been agreeing on a third. There are no rational arguments for another child: We will sacrifice sleep, money, self-entertainment. It always results in more work for parents.
- benterix 2y ago
  Definitely. I believe most people would see the "wrong time" as lack of financial stability. Not being able to depend on a partner is a recipe for a broken family and not a very happy lifer for the child (first-hand experience).
- seanw444 2y ago
  Yeah. I was mostly directing that towards the "the world is going to shit" crowd. I'm also a part of that crowd, but it irks me when people think we're in a unique situation. The world's always been going to shit. It goes to shit in rather short cycles.
  - trilbyglens 2y ago
    previous "going to shit" cycles didn't have the possibility of ending the habitable era of our planet.
    - 2y ago

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

I am 40 and have three children that are teenagers. They are the most important part of my life, have been transformative in my life and would do it over in a second. I did zero family planning because I was in a position where having a child was just assumed as part of life and I could afford it (most can). I wasn’t pressured or forced by my community to, but I didn’t actively try to prevent it once I was married. What I describe above was basically the way people lived with respect to “family planning” since all biological history unto the last few hundred years - namely they didn’t do any The world has changed in the last 100 years - likely for the better - in that we’re now intentional and forceful about consentful sex, accessible birth control, accessible abortion etc…such that fertility isn’t just taken for granted and is fully in the hands (ideally) of the birth mother. The result is that most of my peers on the other hand either have one or zero kids. Why? Cause they actively tried not to have kids. Now the ones who want them are struggling with IVF or HRT etc… and having even one is a blessing. It’s a new world and all the old assumptions about human life don’t hold because we’ve been so successful in building systems and controls for what we’re previously magical, mystical processes.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
I'm 35 with two children and completely agree with you. The sad state of things is that is not assumed anymore you will have children (the opposite). For example, there used to be many family movies (movies that both adults and children could enjoy), but now I can't find many. There are kids movies or adults movies, but family movies are more rare. None of my friends in 2 countries had children (I'm an immigrant). That's shocking, all families with children I had to meet after I had them. Anyway lucky services for families are strong and we can enjoy the time together, but my prospective growing up was to share this also with my friends, so the realization it wouldn't be the case was sad. All of them are losing so much.
happytoexplain 2y ago
This is worded in a way that is a little confusing to me. "Not planning" to have children because "having a child was just assumed", and just letting it happen whenever it happens, is still an explicit plan to have children, regardless of whether it falls under the umbrella of "family planning" as a formal term. Now, people are explicitly deciding not to have children. This would be true regardless of how actively or inactively people used to approach child-having.

ajma 2y ago

In my tech crowd, I often have the most kids (four). Sometimes I meet others with 4 but it's pretty rare. I have a non-tech group of friends. With four, I'm probably more average.

me_me_me 2y ago
where do you live? Israel or Kazakhstan? 4 kids per family as 'average' is almost unheard of in the industrialized world

josefritzishere 2y ago

There are two and only two ways to increase population. The first is via birthrate, (either more people having kids, or having mroe kids per couple) The second is immigration. Immigration can increase the population of available workers now, birthrate obviously has a delay. I expect both political parties in the US will find a rationale to become much more permissive about immigration. the alternative is not good.

ChumpGPT 2y ago

Kids are absolutely amazing. The more time parents invest in them, the more amazing they are. It's a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
It's the most fulfilling work of my life. No career can get close to how impactful it is. It's also a really effective way to really learn that life isn't about you. Not the only way, of course, but a very good one.

TeeMassive 2y ago

The primary factor of people not starting families is the disappearance of blue collar working class jobs.

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readthenotes1 2y ago

This reminds me of the recent hacker News article talking about the overcrowded rat experiment, where the rats also chose not to have children

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
They didn't "choose" it. Their behavior malfunctioned because their conditions made them neurotic. And that behavior persisted even after it was no longer overcrowded due to die-off, probably because of cultural transmission: females who grew to maturity in that environment conditioned what offspring they did have to have those same behaviors regardless of crowding or lack thereof. In the 1990s, I remember being bombarded with messages that "adoption was just as good as having your own child". In high school by teachers, when there was opportunity. From television and media. We've been conditioned too. I won't call it deliberate, but even if it were inadvertent would it matter? No words even have to be said, if you're a young child and they send you to school with other young children, and everyone you know is an only child, what do you grow up to think is the correct number of children for adults to have? The simple answer is "one", but there's an implicit "or zero" that should be tacked on. The children see these "zeros" too, when they notice the adults around them are childless. Those children don't grow up and choose not to any more than the rats chose not to.

shadowgovt 2y ago

Worth highlighting in this video is the discovery in the data by the Economist that more than half of the drop in the US fertility rate is from women aged 15-19 choosing to not have children in that age range. The significant birthrate drop turns out to be an unexpected consequence of a societal goal that various moral actors in the US had been working towards for decades.

Chris2048 2y ago
The commenter describes them as a "backbone", but I'm a little sceptical - Do we really want an economy propped up by unplanned births, and the unwilling, difficult labour of single parents? Also, they never correlate with actual future tax contributions vs use of services, rendering the raw birthrate comparison meaningless..
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Sort of a hallmark of American cognitive dissonance about their place in the global economy is the disconnect between the reality on the ground of how their country makes money and what they want the truth of that story to be. In the modern era for example, we know that American agriculture is basically backstopped by undocumented and underdocumented labor of immigrant workers. Successful 100% enforcement of immigration law and border security would result in a food crisis due to a lack of hands to pick the harvest (because farm incomes are not sustainable paying a standard American living wage). Illegal immigration is currently the backbone of the American agricultural economy, and it's an inconvenient truth that Americans like to ignore.

dnel 2y ago

Have two kids, I always wanted a family around me and I love having them but I don't blame people for making other choices, it is very hard. We were 34 when we had our firstborn, 38 for 2nd, waiting to be financially stable enough, be on the housing ladder etc, but now one of my wife's parents is elderly, the other is dead, one of mine is still working due to delayed state pension age, and the other is raising step grand-kids. Siblings emmigrated and live thousands of miles away so we're on our own in a country that does very little to help parents with astronomical childcare costs, some of the most expensive in Europe. It's a system set up to prevent the next generation from existing, while at the same time the country that is literally rioting against the immigration needed to plug the gap. Sure, call it the "far right" but the sentiments are muttered by many more moderate voices. I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
Immigration doesn't plug the gap, it causes the costs to rise that people complain is the reason for them not having or wanting children. I don't particularly believe that high costs of living are the real reason, seems more like a rationalization to me (else we'd see number of children go smoothly up with higher income, and we don't really see that). But it does seem to be the popular response. Does immigration cause the lower fertility, or does lower fertility cause the immigration? Why can't it be both, death spiral style?
- azemetre 2y ago
  How do you square this opinion with countries like South Korea or Japan, two of which both have extremely low immigration and low fertility? I think the, more obvious IMO, answer is that as a species we no longer have an optimistic vision of the future. Income inequality is rising around the world and in certain elitist circles there are serious discussions about creating a neo-aristocracy/neo-feudalism. Where are the stories about bettering ourselves? Why does it feel like we have to fight the fights of our ancestors to demand the same rights that they bled for? It's depressing and collectively I think the vast majority of us recognize this and feel powerless. People want to fight climate change, but a handful of individuals are able to stop all progress? People want to usher in new civil rights, but now we have to continue to fight for the same rights previous peoples had? People want better welfare programs, but we have to fight to return to previous tax structures that enabled this decades ago? How can you tell an optimistic vision of the future when people are actively fighting, and winning, against it?

techdmn 2y ago

Also, the defect rate on children is surprisingly high, around 3% if memory serves. As the parent of a child with disabilities, my experience has been one of complete devastation. I'm not in a good enough place to have a conversation about this, but also feel an obligation to others in a similar position not to be invisible.

nativespecies 2y ago
My nephew is severely autistic. My brother and his wife struggle mightily and my hat is off to him. I don’t have the strength to do something like that, so I add it as another reason children are not for me.

nine_zeros 2y ago

I dunno - can I have some protection of income when management decides to fire me because I am taking care of my pregnant wife? Can my wife also have pregnancy protection? As a society, can we protect humans from capitalistic predators who will literally cut off food from your table because some KPI is temporarily not met?

Rinzler89 2y ago
The video touches on that, in that birth rates are low even in countries where all those protections exist so it's not just that.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  Not all countries with protection have similar protection. Most countries with protection have patchwork laws that are easily broken. Even the US has laws that pregnant people cannot be discriminated against but they face retaliation and discrimination by citing other means - a patchwork law with no teeth.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Sure, in theory yes nothing written in law is ever 100% secure unless you have an army of well paid lawyers to protect you, but moving the goal posts like this can go on forever. The reality is even countries with iron clad protections they are also having less kids. So that's not the only factor.
    - nine_zeros 2y ago
      Yes, the ask is for ironclad societal-benefit laws with teeth. Not lip service laws.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        And even when those exist birthrates are still low. Look at Scandinavian/Nordic European countries.

lylejantzi3rd 2y ago

The future belongs to those who show up for it. If you don't have kids, that means the future is going to belong to children raised by far right radical parents (since those are most of the people who are choosing to have children these days). Do you really want the future of the country decided by people who were raised with those values?

Gud 2y ago
In my experience, people have very different opinions from their parents.
silverquiet 2y ago
I've never even felt like the present belonged to me now matter how much I showed up; I know for sure the future doesn't, and frankly I've found more peace since I've accepted that.

rich_sasha 2y ago

I wonder what the endgame is. What will happen in 20 years time? One option is that immigrants will pick up the baton. Old childless people might complain about immigrants from XYZ yet pay them for support. Perhaps other jobs will likewise be filled by people emigrating from poorer countries. Another is the same, but the economic growth will slow in these aging societies, and the rich aging countries will turn into poor old countries, without the means to attract immigrants. For different reasons, but the UK labour market is really struggling, as since Brexit it is harder to attract migrant workers in sought after professions. Why should you go do menial jobs in the US if India or Vietnam or Albania is booming, fuelled by healthy demographics, and the US is getting poorer? These now-old countries will sell off their economy for support, basically, a bit how the UK has been selling off bits of it to sustain cash balances. Or go without young hands to do the work, and implode in slow motion. Maybe having children will again become net positive. But if course the lead time on productive humans from scratch is very long.

amriksohata 2y ago

He said something about young single women are really important to society because the under 19s are no longer having children. THis is somewhat a conflation. Under 19s , 30-40 years ago were probably less likely to be single mums. Thats not to say they did not exist, but there were far fewer.

amriksohata 2y ago

He also missed things like divorce laws which now massively favour women, why would a man get married and want to settle and have kids, if half or more is taken away of his castle, his kids and everything he owns.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

I have 2 older teenagers, we live in a very comfortable suburb of Paris, top schools etc. If not for my wife's MS we would have had two more because it was fun, we can afford it and we are in a safe place with a bright future for the kids. I had a discussion with my kids about them having children. They do not want any because of the state of the world. I was with them and told them that if I was in their shoes, knowing how great having kids is - I would not have any either. I simply would not want them to live in the world I will leave behind.

baggy_trough 2y ago
This is by far the best time to be alive for any human in history.
- illiac786 2y ago
  I think the best time was maybe a decade ago, it’s going downward and the outlook is bad. Humans cannot deal well with decline/degradation, it’s very painful to us. Like having a little less money every month – so much worse than having much less money suddenly and then slowly more every month again, even if the total amount of money is the same.
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  Right now, yes. My hypothetical grand-children would be 30 around 2060. With the disastrous predictions for basically everything, and especially climate, I would not to be at my peak at that time.
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    I bet you’re wrong.
    - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
      Maybe. I would not bet on the well-being of my children.

abhiyerra 2y ago

I had a son in the last year. I wanted to be a young dad around 26 but had him at 36. The turning point to having him was when my wife’s friends started having kids. After having a kid she realized how much we love having him. But a delay in that is that the 20s are a critical period for both sexes to built their career. Even though I wanted to be a young dad I did not want her to give up her career over it. Even as a dad who tries to take on a bunch of workload the amount of work that goes to the mother is just significantly higher than the dad. But as a corollary to delaying having kids is that biologically we are not made to have kids so late and my wife and her friends have all experienced complications dues to it.