It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.
For years, some conservatives have framed the declining fertility rate of the United States as an example of eroding family values, a moral catastrophe in slow motion.
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, recently came under fire for saying in 2021 that the nation was run by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”
Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”
Researchers who study trends in reproductive health see a more nuanced picture. The decision to forgo having children is most likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one thing, fertility rates are declining throughout the developed world.
Rather, it indicates that larger societal factors — such as rising child care costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it feel more untenable to raise children in the United States.
It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.
Well, of course it’s not selfishness. Having children is a purely selfish act, because who else are you reproducing for? You can’t do something for someone that doesn’t exist, and bringing existence to someone who hasn’t asked for it, knowing what the world looks like, doesn’t strike me as a kindness. So who else is benefiting? The capitalist machine?
But the world really needs another little copy of me running around because I’m so unique and wonderful! /s
The corporations need more worker meat for the grinder! How dare you selfishly keep that from them!
What about “I just don’t want one.” is that not a legitimate line of thought? That was what I based my decision on. I have never understood why the default state was marriage and then have a family. I can tell you that me and my childless wife are family.
Agreed, I don’t know why people don’t understand that “I don’t want one” is a completely legitimate reason to not have one by itself. Add to that any level of depth you’d like to choose from financial, climate or political reasons to there just being too many people in the world already and it further legitimizes it, but “I just don’t want one” is and should be completely valid on its own.
Many people simply don’t understand the idea of not wanting one. I moved to a more conservative area shortly before I got married, and after I got married I got all the usual questions about kids to which I replied “lol no”. Then I was asked why I even got married. Bro, if I wanted kids, I’d have them and I don’t need to get married to do it.
The main question seems to be why is the birth rate declining. Presumably people not wanting kids have existed during all times. But even if we assume that there are more people per capita who don’t want kids, the question persists, why is that the case, and how much of the decline is attributable to it.
When women were almost always home makers, children were how they’d find fulfillment. Now they can have fulfillment from working careers. At least, this is one of the main reasons I’ve heard about long standing trends in birth rate decline. They predict that the human population on earth will peak between 11 and 12 billion and kind of just stay there.
I bet if the billionaires shared just a bit more we could afford to have more kids and they wouldn’t be looking at their labor force drying up…
There’s the option of importing cheap workforce. It has been tried before… /s
weird how all those tax cuts for rich people lead to them going on real estate purchasing sprees, making housing unaffordable
I just downloaded the raw data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN and ploted it in this graph for the countries I was interested in:
The USA is - according to the data - nothing special in this regard. It’s even positioned best of all the countries with the flattest downwards curve. Just look at South Korea :D
Wow, what happened to South Korea? I heard it was bad but I never realized they were worse than Japan.
It’s a combination of many factors. It’s so extremely expensive to have children here because of how the society is structured and how competitive everything is. If you can’t afford to pay for after school for them to go to every day to and learn additional things they need but don’t get tought at public school, they have no chance to get into a reasonable University and end up with a shitty life.
Another thing is the huge divide between men and women which is getting worse by the day. Men are bitching that women don’t want to date and marry them while not helping with the children or house work at all. So women don’t want to deal with all this shit alone and either get married to very rich guys who can provide a easy life for them or don’t at all and concentrate on their career instead.
The government has poured in unbelievable amounts of money to try to fix it, but nothing is working so far.
I remember seeing a YouTube video that said South Korea’s culture combines the worst parts of East and West. The impossibly high standards of perfection of the East and the crass consumerism of the West, where you must have the most expensive things and look like a movie star or you’re looked down on. I don’t know how true it actually is, though.
They’re not. Higher birth rates are not better when population levels are as high as they are.
Worldwide population is different than the population of specific areas. The country will go extinct in less than 100 years if they continue this trend.
