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Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.
When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.
I really can’t comprehend how someone can look at the state of things and think it is appropriate to subject another person to the rat-ass future that’s coming. That’s before you even consider the expense of raising children, which is also prohibitive.
Not having kids is the only way some of them are gonna be able to afford to live, and less people 30 years from now means they might even be able to afford a place to live if they can retire.
There’s always fearmongering when populations god down, but historically it’s the only time periods normal people can claw back some wealth from the 0.1%
Which is why the wealthy always freak the fuck out. They do t care about people, they care about labor supply, and the more people the cheaper labor.
Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity
The phenomenon of societies having their birth rate fall off as they become wealthier is called the demographic transition.
And further, that correlation exists across a number of axes:
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Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).
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Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).
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Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here’s the US, and more-generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.
Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children.
That’s why the very wealthy want people to keep having lots of kids. Kids make you more willing to take shit in order to feed them and make you poorer and more dependent on your job. That’s not a bad thing about kids, it’s a good thing about parents, but it also makes parents easier to exploit.
Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
Correlation is not causation, there’s no “other way around”…
But what you’re talking about is the drop in fertility due to industrialization and other periods where children worked less and cost more.
That’s different than what I’m talking about; when a labor supply shrinks it means workers get paid more.
That’s just basic supply and demand.
We’re both right, just talking about different things.
There is the real issue of how a society will support its aged population with significantly less young people working than in the past. It requires changes to regulations and taxation and many nations arent ready to accept that and instead somehow expect the smaller number of young people to just pick up the slack and accept they won’t get to retire when they age.
Robots for care
maybe giving people the option for an early peaceful end on thier own terms. It was disgusting watching my great grandfather be trapped in his own body for 10 years. What a horror show. Already planned my way out if it looks like im going to be the same.
Maybe even Basic income for people taking care of elderly family members.
Or better yet basic income for sahm up to 1st grade. Lol could you imagine the pop increase.
Is this a surprise? People can barely afford to take care of themselves these days, why would they want to further burden themselves with a child?
Stop stealing everything from the lower and middle classes and giving it all to the rich, and this trend will magically reverse itself.
There was a podcast I listened to a while back that indicated the opposite, the idea was that the better off people are, the less likely they are to have kids. One of the explanations I remember was that the better off people are, kids are just another competing thing that they can do. For example, if you are well off and can go travel for a long period of time, you might be more inclined to do that vs deciding to have kids. Another stat was that birthrates were higher for lower income people.
Nah this is bullshit. Most people want to raise a family in a home they own. Take away that possibility of certainty of having a roof over your head and then planning for a kid sounds scary. If you don’t want to accept that, you could also blame the micro plastics floating around in everyone’s balls now because plastic was considered such a useful byproduct to the petroleum industry.
How do you explain the inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations?
To me it seems counterintuitive that having more money, or like you said about ability to secure a roof over ones head, would mean less chance of having kids but that seems to be a clear trend. Have you actually looked into it or you just making up bullshit?
Some of us even say, “fuck no.”
Nobody can afford kids with all of the corporate price gouging and wage theft. no shit we’re not having more kids.
