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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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?

> 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.

"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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

The data doesn't support your position.

Birthrates historically increase when the world is burning. They fall during times of peace and prosperity.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Has coercion ever been tried?

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.

Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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-...

There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.

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.

> There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them.

Wow it’s exclusively the worst people. Frankly at this point I don’t really care strongly one way or another about the fertility crisis. My future is fucked regardless. I do find it mildly amusing though the these people sperg out so much over the fact that their Ponzi schemes could come to and end.

You people fucked my future and you want me to save that of yours and your family’s? lmao