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I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hard

• lackerloser 8mo ago
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• pydry 8mo ago
  Theyre probably all correct. Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
  • tcmart14 8mo ago
    Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.
    • deleted 8mo ago
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• mullingitover 8mo ago
  There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.
• AndrewDucker 8mo ago
  I think there are two steps: 1) Make people want to have kids. 2) Make it feasible for them to do so. People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
  • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks. And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
    • brewdad 8mo ago
      When we were dating my wife always said she didn't want to have an only child. I was fine with only having one but always assumed we'd have at least two. After going through pregnancy, she decided she was fine with never doing that again. Her's wasn't an especially difficult pregnancy, she simply didn't realize the toll it would take on her. So we have one kid who is about to leave the nest.
  • inetknght 8mo ago
    > People already want more kids than they're having Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
    • AndrewDucker 8mo ago
      "for every three kids wanted… only two are born". https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyv7211jljo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyv7211jljo
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• anonym29 8mo ago
  Israel had a net birth rate increase from 2000-2025 despite being at war and under regular rocket barrages for much of that time. While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
  • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/ https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona... > Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then. >Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
  • myth_drannon 8mo ago
    Israel is a very complex case to say the least... But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
  • NoLinkToMe 8mo ago
    I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect. Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer. I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
• eptcyka 8mo ago
  Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.
  • tahoeskibum 8mo ago
    Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.
    • eptcyka 8mo ago
      This hasn’t been my personal and 2nd hand experience.
    • polski-g 8mo ago
      That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.
    • piva00 8mo ago
      Where though? It isn't the case here in Sweden, it's pretty great.
    • tirant 8mo ago
      Not in Germany, though.
    • dpc050505 8mo ago
      I had great childcare that was subsidized such that my parents paid 7$ a day when I was a kid.
  • monero-xmr 8mo ago
    In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare. The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas. From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents. When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
  • jvandreae 8mo ago
    The simple fact is that values are partially heritable, and if you believe your values to be superior (you should!) then having children and encouraging people who share those values to have children is a good way to propagate those values. This works for ~any set of values.
• biophysboy 8mo ago
  What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
  • margalabargala 8mo ago
    I think that perfectly aligns with their take. People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.
    • biophysboy 8mo ago
      That actually makes sense. I think I broadly agree with this. Maybe we can do 100 different little things to help people feel like they are "set up".
    • SoftTalker 8mo ago
      Peak fertility though is early 20s. By the time people are in their 30s, having trouble getting pregnant is a more common problem.
      • ziml77 8mo ago
        Are people who want to have kids really struggling to have them though? Keep in mind that fertility rate is not actually about fertility (not directly at least). It's a measure of the kids being had rather than a measure of the capability that the name would lead people to think.
        • tayo42 8mo ago
          Ivf is way more frequent then it used to be
      • margalabargala 8mo ago
        Exactly. So since we observe that actual birth rates among women in their 30s displays a different trend than that of women in their 20s, despite decreased natural fertility, there has to be more going on.
• cco 8mo ago
  That doesn't seem to be supported by the data, the "nicer" and richer a country becomes, birth rates drop. And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate. How do you square those facts with your view here?
  • drowsspa 8mo ago
    People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.
    • anthonypasq 8mo ago
      you think people in Chad are optimistic about the future of their village and are therefore having lots of kids? Give me a break dude.
      • drowsspa 8mo ago
        Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space? (edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
      • flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
        Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.
        • drowsspa 8mo ago
          Yeah, I grew up poor in the 3rd world (not quite Chad level though) and even the upper class culture of my own country was almost alien for us and vice versa... Imagine the 1st world.
      • cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
• dataviz1000 8mo ago
  There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country. Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
  • alephnerd 8mo ago
    The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC. Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras). I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
    • dataviz1000 8mo ago
      I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive. Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba. Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
    • boelboel 8mo ago
      I find it a much more conscious choice for high paid immigrants. They can either live closely with their family, with the added bonus they basically live like a 'king' or they can move countries to live relatively wealthy lives in a new country. Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice. But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
• JPKab 8mo ago
  "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon. The 3 things: 1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together. This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case. We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
  • cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
    You really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough. In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival. In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
    • drowsspa 8mo ago
• Hizonner 8mo ago
  > Since the fertility problem is worldwide Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide. The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
  • jedberg 8mo ago
    Not entirely. Sperm counts in young men have been falling for decades. No one is sure why.
    • Balgair 8mo ago
      https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-... Per the above, it seems that the change in spermcount worldwide seems to be flat.
      • jedberg 8mo ago
        Interesting. That page shows some pretty strong evidence that the prevailing thinking is incorrect. Will have to look more.
• keiferski 8mo ago
  I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them. After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
• gambutin 8mo ago
  Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies. "How dare you asking me when I will have children?" It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore. Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years: - Chad - Somalia - DR Congo Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
  • foobarian 8mo ago
    I think if artificial wombs ever succeed it will turn the world upside down
    • overfeed 8mo ago
      Thanks to inequality, the rich[1] can already afford surrogacy, aka other people's natural wombs. Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect. 1. i.e. FAANG employees
• lukeschlather 8mo ago
  > No amount of baby cash There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
  • alephnerd 8mo ago
    > hire a competent housekeeper/nanny They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid). More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
    • 8note 8mo ago
      there's also other options - your own parents, and other new parents and their parents. "it takes a village" is an old saying that isnt going anywhere
  • hamdingers 8mo ago
    That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one. If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market. IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
    • kccqzy 8mo ago
      That basically sounds like retirement. If you choose to stop working because of kids, you could be entitled to receive social security just like in old age.
  • stephc_int13 8mo ago
• cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
  I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement. Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange. And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
  • tshaddox 8mo ago
    > Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange. Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children. You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
    • cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
      I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much. It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life. So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
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• onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is... From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons. 1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner 2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want 3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men) 4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one. It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like. TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
  • cameldrv 8mo ago
    IMO this is a huge piece of it. People want to have it all, and things are structured where in order to have a decent income, you have to go to college. Then to pay off your loans and make it worthwhile you have to work a number of years. Then you have Madison Avenue telling you you need a fancy car, vacations, etc. You’re told you need to own a house to have a kid. You’re not even to zero by the time you’re 30, the same place prior generations were at 18. That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.
• knuckleheads 8mo ago
  Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
  • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    > TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world. Coincidentally, TFR was higher when women had to be paired up with a man and have sex without the use of birth control.
    • knuckleheads 8mo ago
      It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.
• Bratmon 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest. I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
  • malux85 8mo ago
    Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids. In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest. But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance" Very different things
    • thewebguyd 8mo ago
      > But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance" Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival. That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
  • j16sdiz 8mo ago
    Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
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• brettgriffin 8mo ago
  > you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0]. As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain. [0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-data https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
• influx 8mo ago
  It’s surprising that effective, cheap contraceptives aren’t on the list. We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards? Thats kind of the point.
• achierius 8mo ago
  > No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
  • Balgair 8mo ago
    Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference. Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah... All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects. 'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'. I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see. But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.
• kraig911 8mo ago
  It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize. Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair' Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled. Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
  • arethuza 8mo ago
    "people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled" I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through. So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
  • BugsJustFindMe 8mo ago
    > I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
• ambicapter 8mo ago
  That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.
  • niggernagger 8mo ago
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• deleted 8mo ago
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• Anonyneko 8mo ago
  Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
• logicchains 8mo ago
  >My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
  • null_deref 8mo ago
    That’s not true, secular Israelis fertility rates are also above the replacement level and are quite high
• alpha_squared 8mo ago
  I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids. The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors? All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
  • maybelsyrup 8mo ago
    > having men who'd make women comfortable having kids This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence. At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
    • jvandreae 8mo ago
      Female/leftist projection at its finest. There is no single group more entitled than the AWFL.
      • maybelsyrup 8mo ago
        There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable: > Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty. > In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his. > In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer. > He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area, he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane. > One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew. > He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.” > Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result. I'm praying for you, internet friend!
• aeternum 8mo ago
  The data doesn't support your position. Birthrates historically increase when the world is burning. They fall during times of peace and prosperity.
• SoftTalker 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
• bhouston 8mo ago
  You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
• miroljub 8mo ago
  The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were: - your workforce - your retirement plan - your elderly care plan - your security - your private army Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children. Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
  • program_whiz 8mo ago
    Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness. Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
    • Johanx64 8mo ago
      > once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part! The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself? You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it. Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool. It truly is beautiful.
      • jvandreae 8mo ago
        > The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself? The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
• whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
• RobertoG 8mo ago
  you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. [..] That's a gigantic task, [..]" Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• rayiner 8mo ago
  Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-steady-decrease-among-young-us-men https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s... I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
  • jacquesm 8mo ago
    That's because a foreign substance is introduced into their precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.
• xyzelement 8mo ago
  I used to think similarly but I disagree. Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof. In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6. So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
• 01284a7e 8mo ago
  RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. --- "Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus" People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
  • Balgair 8mo ago
    Lord isn't that true...
• lostlogin 8mo ago
  Great comment. > Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them. I’m not sure I agree with this. Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
• samus 8mo ago
  One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
• sph 8mo ago
  s/fertility/any other complex issue in the world/ and the rest of the comment still applies. The issue here is trying to make sense of any of it on Twitter.
• ajross 8mo ago
  > I like to hang out on fertility twitter. I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while. We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids. Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
  • Balgair 8mo ago
    > Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
    • ajross 8mo ago
      > believe that their children will have good lives Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she? I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
      • throaway1998 8mo ago
        "The Beggar CEO"
• didgetmaster 8mo ago
  Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better. Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices. You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
  • mothballed 8mo ago
    Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros. You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.
• takklob 8mo ago
  [dead]
• duxup 8mo ago
  I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything. I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
• outside1234 8mo ago
  It's all of it. We need cheaper housing, we need cheaper childcare, and cheaper food. Basically all of the things the current administration is sabotaging. Not going to end well.
• everdrive 8mo ago
  No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
• socalgal2 8mo ago
  My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago. Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture". Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids" There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
  • sizzle 8mo ago
    It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
    • tasuki 8mo ago
      Third such comment I see in this thread. And... so what? What does the Darwinian purpose have to do with anything mentioned here?
      • giardini 8mo ago
        Choosing to not have children appears to "swim against the current" of the dominant biological process/context by which one came to be and in which one exists. Certainly not having children allows one more time to pursue other matters. Mankind in general might gain (or lose) from such behavior, depending on whether one is an Einstein or a Stalin for example. Most anyone who participates in society has some set of interests and pursuit of those interests is nonetheless very real and the results may dominate our perspective. I see no clear way to judge whether a person contributes more through his/her work or through his/her children. Nor do I think "contributing" (whatever that means) is a known evaluation anyway. And what one man considers useful another might judge detrimental. All the more b/c history is "unfinished business". IMO in summary we simply cannot know. Aside: there's a T-shirt that shows the sinking bow of a shipwreck through a telescope lens. It's labeled thusly: "MISTAKES - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Yet another viewpoint.
• Johanx64 8mo ago
  > Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them. Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way. Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past. People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc. That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works. The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse. The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out. Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
  • tuna74 8mo ago
    "People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc." Here is the fertility rate in Bangladesh: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/bgd/bangladesh/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/bgd/ban...
    • Johanx64 8mo ago
      I stand corrected, it doesn't have "insane fertility rate". That's still a high fertility rate for a country with stats like this: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/bangladesh.html https://www.globalhungerindex.org/bangladesh.html > 25.1% of children under five are stunted, 10.7% of children under five are wasted And the country had even higher fertility rates when it had higher frequency of famines, and much higher rates of hunger and malnourishment. The point i was making however, is that parents don't truly - at a deeper level - consider the quality of life they are subjecting their child to. Natural selection doesn't maximize for quality of life (it doesn't care for it), it selects for procreation and survival.
• nine_k 8mo ago
  I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker. This is not a society most of us want to return to. I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
• sizzle 8mo ago
  It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
  • NoLinkToMe 8mo ago
    Please don't post the same sentence 3 times in one thread.
    • sizzle 8mo ago
      Noted for next time. What are your thoughts on the subject matter while you are here?
      • NoLinkToMe 8mo ago
        Sorry for the late reply. In principle I agree, in a darwinian sense the purpose is to pass on genetics. That's not really a matter of opinion I'd say, although perhaps I'd have chosen a different word than 'purpose', I tend to agree. But what's the point of saying that? What larger point are you making? If I say water is wet, sure you'll agree, but why did I mention it in the first place? I didn't understand your post in that sense yet, perhaps you can expand. W.r.t. the darwinian 'purpose' though: I also agree with some posters in this thread noting accurately that our darwinian sexual drive can be satisfied without passing on genes. (ample birth control & pornification of just about any sexual niche you can imagine). So while our sexual urges are to support passing on genetics, the world around us can pacify that urge to the point it's satisfied without passing on your genetics. As such our darwinian instincts aren't effective in the same way as they used to be. Plenty of men are satisfying many of their urges, ultimately dying childless, much more so than in the past. Second, plenty of parents satisfy their urges with 1 or 2 children instead of 8 in the past, insufficient for replacement-levels, but sufficient to pass on genes.
• castlecrasher2 8mo ago
  Everyone in this thread saying otherwise is wrong, the problem is low testosterone, simple as; there's obviously other factors causing actual health-related low fertility, but as for the lack of having children it's simply low testosterone.
• lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
  As you say, a lot of the reasons people give are flippant and superficial. The most common claim I've seen is that everything is too expensive, but this is untrue. For some time, we have been richer than we've ever been in history, on the whole, and yet we witness decline. And all of the money-oriented incentives gov'ts have deployed have also petty much failed. The problem is composed of multiple factors. However, I would say that there is a unifying element, a master key, that explains all of these elements, and that is consumerism. I mean "consumerism" as an ethos and as a matter of culture. 1. People are creatures of convention. Very few people operate or live life outside of the conventions of their times and of their culture. Culture creates the grain of life most people will follow, for better or for worse. In general, people are terrified of swimming upstream or going against the grain. 2. Subjectively speaking, culture determines conventions, sensibilities, patterns of life, purposes and goals pursued, and what is valued. Culture, whether explicitly or implicitly, imbues people with a sense of how life ought to be lived and where energies ought to be spent. It shapes attitudes toward the facts of life. 3. Inevitably, culture is institutionalized in law. As law is a teacher, culture is partly perpetuated through law. 4. Culture is also replicated and reinforced through media and education. It is usually insinuated. 5. Consumerism construes human nature and human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The obvious case is economic consumption. We believe buying things will make us whole. We believe money is the root of happiness. The life is the market and the market is life. Everything is for sale, for the right price. 6. This already creates an opposition. If consumption makes us whole, then children are antithetical to wholeness. After all, children are consumers! They are competitors. Given the choice between a new luxury car and another child, many couples would choose the car. People routinely make this calculation. They will limit their brood, because children eat into budgets and into time that could otherwise be spent on luxury items and vacations on tropical islands (mutatis mutandis). 7. If consumption makes us whole, then everything else that might be desired is recast as a matter of consumption as well. Even human relationships are reconsidered in consumerist terms. Sexual relationships become consumerist and transactional. Sex itself becomes commoditized, and becomes an instrument of the market. Beauty is desecrated and exploited to push products and services. A functional prostitution and an exploitative stance invade and pollute relations between the sexes, rendering them totally dysfunctional. 8. Contraception enters the picture. Contraception is the paradigmatic expression and cornerstone of all sexual consumerism. It is the incarnation of sterility and physical manifestation of a "NO" to life. It is a manifest contradiction of the essential and core function of sexual intercourse, which is procreative (the other end, the unitive, presupposes the procreative purpose, and so the denial of the procreative is a denial of the unitive). Its acceptance and normalization dethrones the procreative and elevates the pleasurable in its place. Thus, sex is no longer pleasurable. Sex is now for pleasure. The paradox, of course, is that doing this destroys the pleasure of sex, producing a pathological hunt for pleasure that is increasingly bizarre. 9, By denying the procreative, we undermine the significance of the deep complementarity of the sexes. This destroys sexual normativity and opens the door to a consuming and obsessive pursuit of an increasingly unhinged and dizzying array of erotic perversion. Children again become opposition. A child is a wet blanket thrown on the hot fire of deviant eroticism. This way enters abortion as a solution, and the pursuit of intrinsically sterile sexual gratification. 9. Consumerism propels careerism. The career is underpinned by the presupposition that you will need money to consume. A career is your path to making more money so that you can be more happy. Universities are reconfigured away from fuddy-duddy old school liberal arts education to job training centers. Woman are now taught that to be a fulfilled woman is to seek a career. Marriage and childbearing are postponed, not only to attend university, but to spend one's most fertile years shoring up one's careers after graduation. One must justify that expensive education (expensive in time and money). Careerism sacrifices the family for the mirage of consumerism. 10. Now, human life is also commoditized. When women do come around to wanting children, whether for good or bad reasons, they often discover that they are too old, having made a sacrificial offering of their fertility to their corporate god. But we believe we are entitled to children. We believe we are entitled to other human beings as instruments of our fulfillment. So we pursue fertility treatments like IVF. IVF is consumerism on steroids. 12. Consumerism reshapes social practices and life patterns. It created friction and impediments that make having children more difficult, because the assumptions that underpin it maintain that you won't have children, at least not until later. The implicit support, the social and economic architecture of the world and its operations and customs, become hostile to family life. Bad habits, like living beyond one's means, are fed. We demand a standard of living we cannot afford, and view children as hostile elements that rob us of our birthright. 13. A culture must justify itself. Thus, each failed generation rationalizes its bad decisions to soothe its own collective ego by re-presenting its failures as normative to the next. The solution really is simple: women ought to marry in their mid-20s on average and start having children immediately. The obstacles are cultural and habitual. Our culture creates friction and our cultural programming causes us to deviate from the successful pattern. Instead of ordering the patterns of human life around human nature and human development, we strap human beings into a Procrustean culture, torturing and deforming them to suit weird and arbitrary standards. Instead of conforming our desires to reality, we deform reality in an attempt to conform it to our desires. This is human arrogance and human folly.
• 8note 8mo ago
  I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex. "its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
• oxag3n 8mo ago
  It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5. I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us. Mean age was 21.5 in 1970.
• tasuki 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. I think this is not the right explanation. If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids. Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
  • Herring 8mo ago
    The poor have nothing to lose. It's the same around the world today, poor countries have high fertility. The OECD middle class has low fertility because they're worrying about other stuff (lost wages, career stagnation, etc). The rich (high fertility) have plenty of money for private schools, nannies, housekeepers, extracurriculars, etc for 14+ kids (Musk). It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
• dragonelite 8mo ago
  I personally think we over urbanised. If i look at my friends circle, most of the urban ones are childless and the rural ones have 2~4 kids. Super anecdotal and totally non scientific observation.
  • NoLinkToMe 8mo ago
    There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards. Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing. Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering. If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need. Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life. Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
    • dragonelite 8mo ago
      From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
      • NoLinkToMe 8mo ago
        Sorry for the late reply. For me it's different. For one it's like you said: friends that never left the rural areas have kids more often. But also friends that I grew up with in urban environments, left to rural environments around the time of having kids. Those that didn't, stayed. It seems that those who preferred to spend more for the cultural offering of the city stayed and optimised their time to enjoy that cultural offering by not having kids (bars, cafes, museums, hobbies, sports, travel, career). While those that preferred family life, chose to optimize for that by moving to a place where housing was more affordable, allowing less time spent on career, more time spent on family.
• maxglute 8mo ago
  Has coercion ever been tried?
• creature_x 8mo ago
  Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents. I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ? Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I have tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire
• unmole 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
• giardini 8mo ago
  No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!' If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do. All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
• rstuart4133 8mo ago
  > My take on it is: Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87% https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-semiconductor https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se... TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
• lazide 8mo ago
  Eh, historically, both worse and better living conditions led to more kids. It’s not that simple.
• raxxorraxor 8mo ago
  > I like to hang out on fertility twitter. This is why I love the internet because this sentence alone holds so much treasure. Seriously, the issue is more our economic system. It is certainly not humanity in danger of dying out with 8 billion people, on the contrary... Some argue the wrong people procreate, but meh... Personally I just think less people want children because they find other things to do.
• wolvoleo 8mo ago
  I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit. It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal. I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore. A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
• MrSkelter 8mo ago
  Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4. The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors. I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.