Quokk.auReal reasons people do not have the number of children they want revealed in new report
www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun…
This article notes that "right-wing governments, including the US and Hungary, are increasingly blaming falling fertility rates on a rejection of parenthood", as if today's young adults just don't want children.
But the author suggests that actually people do want children, and one of the main reasons they're having fewer children is because they can't afford many children.
Thoughts?
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Factors such as the high cost of parenthood, job insecurity, expensive housing, concerns over the state of the world and the lack of a suitable partner stop people having the families they want, rather than any desire not to have children, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said.
(...)and the answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.”
Saved you a click
And to immediately reply to my own post:
I really really don't want to raise kids, and this century is pretty much the first one where that's actually an option.
I have a great husband, a suitable house, a good job (and so does he). But since we don't want to spend two decades raising children, we chose not to have them. Because that's an option. We don't need children as a labor force for subsistence farming, we don't get kids as a result of recreational sex and we don't need children to provide for us in old age. That's entirely new, none of those things were true a hundred years ago, and many still aren't true in other parts of the world.
So yeah, even people who are super privileged like us, might still not have kids, because we think having kids sucks.
MothraSo another study that found out what the majority already considered obvious, except for some old fashioned extreme religious minorities
I have a suspicion that while all those reasons are legit, lots of people just don't want them
People are seeing an alternative to the classic life-script, and are choosing to be child-free, but there's still a lot of stigma surrounding it, so people make all sorts of excuses rather than saying "I just don't want kids"
shani66Even if your brain tricks you into caring with a chemical cocktail to rival any drug being fear mongered about, if you aren't already high the entire prospect of parenthood seems awful. From destroying your body to forcing you to entirely reorientate your life around a burden that can't even sleep without dying. Especially in an era kids can't even walk down the street alone without some Karen calling the cops, you can't even catch a break after they are old enough to exist independently.
TL;DR: money.
It's always just money. They want us to breed more slaves but they're not willing to put up any collateral.
Also, civilsation is going to be brought to its knees by climate change in the coming decades.
Feels somewhat immoral to put someone you love through that.
Automation is going to chew up jobs faster than new ones are created, too.
Reduce the value of white collar labor, and white collar workers will flood to the blue collar trades, drastically reducing pay there as well.
Not a suitable environment for growing large families.
Raising children requires hope for he future.
Of course the first post ww2 generation to see lower prospects then their parents. Will hesitate to bring children into that future.
This is one of my main reasons for not wanting kids…why would I want to bring a child into a world where I couldn’t guarantee them a decent standard of upbringing and think that the world is only going to get worse over the next 20 years anyway?
The people who do all the handwringing about falling birth rates are the same people who bring them about by their shitty policies.
Falling birthrates are not a problem for humanity.
They're a problem for capitalism which can't rely on that for nebulous "growth" figures.
But if capitalists really want a solution, then a home for two adults and two children should be affordable on one average wage, not two. Build more and make them cheaper. If you can't do that then you don't care about the problem enough.
A plateauing population is a good thing! Growth is not a good thing! I don't get how people don't understand this. If something is going up forever it will eventually collapse spectacularly, if it's stable instead it'll stay stable.
We are only one and done because of financial constraints. I'd say that the package of benefits the government offers parents in my location is fantastic and good on them for doing so well to pull it out of the bag. However, what they don't help with is early years childcare costs (0-3 years) which costs us around the same as our mortgage each month. Only now are we able to get 30 hours paid care. That would be ok if the cost of living and mortgage rates weren't already exorbitant and we cannot even consider taking another 3 year hit with our current young dependant.
So yeah, we'd love another kid, but we aren't able to afford one!
This makes no sense
How does that gel with the poorest countries in the world with societies that treat women like shit having the highest birth rate?
There's a difference between Women harming their careers by having children, and not being able to a career other than SAHM because you aren't able to get a career job in the first place. Both are sexist, and while it would work to increase the birth rate to remove women's rights, it is morally reprehensible, and yes looks sternly at the US, we see what you are doing!
Most people, woman or not, don't have "careers"
They have jobs vast majority of which are very low quality lol
Honestly can't tell if you're trolling with this.
Any job that would give you an advantage when applying for a new job (ie. Prior experience) is part of a career. For more formal careers like Medicine and Law they are an absolute necessity and often formally defined, for careers like Bartender, the requirements are more fluid, but experience (and particularly unbroken experience) is very important when applying for jobs.
Nope. Only true if the new job offers benefit over the previous jobs.
Sorry to tell you this. But for many in modern society that is simply not the case. The growth in income or benefit at best covers the increase in cost of living.
With the huge increases in housing costs alone. Long term employment. Stable or steady replacement. Often fails to pay the increased dost of surviving as low income workers age.
For many low income families jobs last as long as the company success followed by random layoffs to support company shareholders. Followed by inflation only replacement work.
This is in no way a career just survival.
Careful buddy, you might OD on daddy's koolaid lol
The acces to birth control?
Correct but even places with limited BC access. It seems everywhere birth rate is declining, including Muslim and African countries