Ask Lemmy

Only get pregnant if you can afford it.

OK

No, not like that

The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they'll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then

I can't prove it but I suspect that they are having about as many children as they want and our expectations of 'fertility rates' are actually skewed by the number of unwanted pregnancies that were forced on people who then existed in the space of 'We didn't ask for this but now we love the little shit so I guess we'll make the best of it.' The world is and has been changing so fast for the last century or so that our sense of long term trends is much harder to understand.

My take is "How can I afford to have a kid when I can't even take care of myself?".

Countries can't have children, they're not alive.

We're like pandas in captivity. We'll fuck if the conditions are right. They haven't been right in a loooooong time. A little bit of enrichment in our enclosures would help tremendously.

Have you seen how the world is doing?

Here are my reasons:

• We are already starting to feel the effects of global warming, it will only get worse and people don't take it serious. Why should Ibput another soul into this world just to suffer from the stupidity of others?
• Child care is super expensive and quality isn't great and being a stay at home parent isn't really an option if you want too keep up in the work market place.
• Why should I have a kid, if I'm not gonna spend time with them? I mean to feed them & offer them all the anemities, me and my partner would need to work full-time, so when are we gonna spend time with our kid?
• edit see bellow why.
• I like my freedoms.
• The schooling system is shit. Why should I raise kids in a society that starts the "grind" at age 5 and keeps you going until you are 65?
• etc.

Other activities outcompete children.

The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they'd rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.

That's for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don't scale as well as they used to.

You can only raise kids properly if you can afford it.

capitalism

Capitalism

I think we need to accept that humans really just don't want (many) kids, and that the so-called 'urge to procreate' is really just the 'urge to have sex' - and unlike 500 years ago they are no longer the same thing. We can choose to have all the sex we want without becoming pregnant. That is what people want, and it has nothing to do with affordability.

Sure, money might be one factor of many for some people, but if money was really the main issue, then rich countries would have a higher fertility rate, right? Rich people would have more kids, right? Well, the opposite is true. People getting richer, more educated, having better access to healthcare, and last but not least: women obtaining more rights.. All of this has made it so people have fewer children. Are we really going to keep deluding ourselves and write it all off as a financial issue? People nowadays are not poorer than in the past. All throughout history poor people have been having kids. It's just that now they have a choice. And they choose not to.

tl;dr I think what has changed is that people (read: women) have a choice now and they simply choose not to have (as many) kids.

Here in Northern Sweden the preschools in the cities are all closing down due to lack of kids. We have the opposite problem in the villages. Long waiting lists and shortages. Our municipality, population 5000, has 6 existing preschools and just built a new one. City housing costs more than 3 times as much as the villages and small towns. Families can't afford housing in the city. It's all rich retired people in the larger houses and young single people in tiny apartments.

Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.

People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.

Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?

Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.

I know 30-somethings that live with their parents because they cannot afford their own house and there are no decent rental houses available either.

japan and SOUTH korea have this insane work culture, that your lives or to live at your job, and must be drinking with t he bosses after. also heavily ostracized if you arnt making it in those countries. SK is apparently at a worst position than JAPAN birthwise goes.

china is currently have thier own crisis, thier 1-child policy has a created a deficiency of women , thats why they have become so obsessed of tracking womens lives, plus trying to "encourage sex. they also overproduce stem graduates with no job markets going around too. all this associated with HCOL as well.

plus the poor job markets for stem majors, even with tech laying off you can still find a job somewhere. but other stem have alot more requirements to enter the field. biotech, bio, Psyche if you think you can get away by not getting a PsyD or phd.

women getting education is a major factor of having less or no children, thats why there has been significant initiative in many universitis to help woman get experience in stem, like bio degrees. this does has unintentional effect of leaving men behind in bio specifically.

Education time and income instability. People are well into their 30s before they know where to settle down after finishing an education. They're well into their 40s before they can afford to.

If any country wanted to increase childbirth rates, they ought to lower working time, increase education pay and move employment out of the central cities.

Or put simply: Money and time needs to be available for the people they want to reproduce.

Now, I just saw the latest Kurzgesagt episode on this, and there's one thing they missed: Automation. We don't necessarily need to keep a stable or increasing population if only we can automate a lot more labour. In my opinion it's the only solution to avoid the future population crisis.

The main reason, that for some reason no one talked about yet, is that we developed and have effective and cheap contraceptives.

All other concerns are almost irrelevant. The truth is that we are very driven by immediate desires, and the "later" problem of having children goes out of the window when you're horny and have the opportunity to have sex. If there's no access to contraceptives, the choice between having sex and having children, or not having sex and no children, is almost always won by "having sex".

But if you can have access to contraceptives, you do not have to chose between sex and no sex anymore. The reality is just that children have always been more inconvenient than not. I'm sure if at any point in history (or even in a perfectly utopian society) if contraceptives were developed and made available, and weren't before, the same thing would happen.

Cost of living

Everything is so god damn expensive. And it gets worse every single day.

Don't worry though, no country is really worried about it yet because if they were they would work on making things not so obscenely fucking ridiculously expensive. (Although knowing rich bastards they'd probably just let humanity die out before they lost 5¢ on every sale)

Or at least give some sort if credit to you to lift the burden a bit. I think maybe South Korea is doing this and some Nordic countries and even China too I believe.

But still, if you have to get the calculator out and figure out how many meals you need to skip this month to be able to pay your bills I think having sex is the last thing on your mind.

Shit, most people probably ran their mates off already from the insane, soul crushing, non stop fucking stress that being able to never get ahead in your entire life brings. Bonus points if you already had a child with them, now you get to have 25% if your income stolen from you for the next 18 years (25 if they go to college) even if you see them more than they do in a lot of instances. That will sure get you in the mood.

And if not its still hard to want to fuck when you're hungry or when you're constantly about to lose it all and barely hanging on by a thread and obsessing about that reality in your head every single second of every single day.

TLDR: shit is too god damn expensive and it just keeps getting worse with absolutely no end in sight.

i personally am afraid that my child would live through a terrible future. also: i just dont feel like it. so maybe the existential anciety is more subconcious? idk

Over here in Spain it’s because of lack of funding. Theres little to no support for child care, if you have a kid here your either working tooth to the bone or off well and even still you only have 1 kid because 2 is too expensive.

Hmm...

There's only one culprit here, and it's 100% responsible for this phenomenon: Countries can't have children. Only People can have children.

As far as i am aware every country on this planet has kids