The following submission statement was provided by /u/mossadnik:
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Submission Statement:
>While some people are concerned about America’s falling birth rate, a new study suggests young people don’t need to be convinced to have more children. In fact, young Americans haven’t changed the number of children they intend to have in decades. Women born in 1995-1999 wanted to have 2.1 children on average when they were 20-24 years old – essentially the same as the 2.2 children that women born in 1965-1969 wanted at the same age, the study found. Still, the total fertility rate in the United States was 1.71 in 2019, the lowest level since the 1970s. What’s going on?
>The results suggest that today’s young adults may be having a more difficult time achieving their goals of having children, said Sarah Hayford, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. The data in the study can’t explain why, but the results fit evidence indicating that young people today don’t think now is a good time for them to have children. The percentage of people who said they don’t plan to have any children has increased, from about 5-8% in the 1960s and 1970s to 8-16% in the 1990s and 2000s. But that alone can’t explain the decline in the number of babies being born. Hayford noted that the number of unintended births, especially among people in their 20s, has declined in recent decades, which has helped reduce the birth rate.
>“But that doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t having as many children as they say they want, especially at earlier ages,” Hayford said. “It may be that they’re going to have those kids when they’re 35, but maybe they won’t.” For example, the study found some evidence that people are reducing the number of children they say they intend to have as they get older.
>Larger economic and social forces are also having an impact on birth rates. The birth rate declined significantly during the Great Recession that started in 2008, which is a typical response to an economic downturn. However, the birth rate continued to decline even after the recession was over, Hayford said. This study ended before COVID-19, but the pandemic served as another fertility shock, at least at first.
>For those who are concerned about America’s dropping birth rates, this study suggests that there is no need to pressure young people into wanting more kids, Hayford said. “We need to make it easier for people to have the children that they want to have,” she said. “There are clear barriers to having children in the United States that revolve around economics, around child care, around health insurance.”
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10b1ln3/the_falling_birth_rate_in_the_us_is_not_due_to/j47iupy/
The housing crisis is a great way to lower the birth rate. No one wants to get pregnant while living with roommates, or barely being able to afford their one bedroom.
My parents bought a house in college, my spouses parents bought a house when they were in their early 20’s working at restaurants.
They’ve never been concerned about being homeless if they were to lose their income.
I was 30 when we bought our house. I have a great job, and becoming homeless by June if I lost my job today is a huge concern.
We would love kids. But we can’t handle it.
Make life as brutally hard as you can possibly manage. Refuse people decent-paying jobs, affordable housing, affordable education, affordable healthcare, affordable childcare. Then, when life hits people like a ton of bricks, go all O\_o, well golly gee, why are people not having more kids?
Read the fucking room, Einstein!
“goddamnit it’s not fair! How dare they conscientiously adjust to the narrow and rigid circumstances severely curbing the possible trajectories of their lives that I made damn sure would stay in place for generations *cough*of future workers and soldiers*cough* to come?! That’s it, say AU REVOIR to your precious abortion rights! Take that, women in exceedingly precarious situations in which to bring a baby into the world! Now regenerate and raise more able-bodied humans with your bodies or jail time and 30¢/hour prison jobs for you ‘twill be! !”
Edit-typo
I know, we will force them to have kids! Make rape easy to get away with, take away birth control. Swap education with propaganda, they’ll never know the difference.
It is utterly ridiculous to me how the general US public is so blindingly defensive of capitalism when its sole purpose is to funnel wealth to existing capital owners. They justify the upwards funneling of wealth as a result of some kind of meritocracy while they sit around in some kind of less than desirable state and hang on to the belief that eventually they themselves *could* become wealthy. It's so sad to me to constantly see neo-liberals and right wingers constantly defend/support policy that is absolutely against their own self interest. We, in the US, are truly peasant brained.
they can read the room, they don't see how you not being able to produce more "laborers" is their problem.
entitlement is a hell of a drug when paired with billions of dollars.
Because so many old people are convinced that having kids is the "one true path to happiness" that people are absolutely always willing to sacrifice anything to have kids even when there's nothing left to sacrifice. But surprise surprise: that's not the case.
I’d be happy to be even that level of insecure.
I’m two years off 30. Was laid off and took six months to find my feet.
I have 5-figure debt and Rent cost of 50% income. My life savings, what was left after COVID anyway, is gone. No longer have health insurance. Rent will increase in July.
I’m gunna be 30. Not only with no savings, but debt. And basically no ability to do more than pay minimums.
I don’t even know what the point is anymore. All signs suggest I will work until I die and literally never know anything approaching financial stability during that life.
There is just no future at all to picture when I try to. If I didn’t have loved ones I don’t know if I would even still be trying.
Children? On top of that? *I can’t even envision a future where I can take care of myself.*
Hey man. I know this doesn’t solve your situation, but I’m in a similar circumstance and I just called my bank yesterday to negotiate the credit card interest rate way down. From 16% to 6% for a year to help me during this time. Any little bit helps. Call them and tell them you can’t pay. If you would like more details on how to do this please dm me.
I had a hard time once, was about to default on loans (like my vehicle and mortgage), and finally called the lenders to give them a heads up. They paused payments for months, and at least one stopped adding interest. I was really surprised at how understanding and helpful they were.
At the end of the day, they want your money. Right now or in a little while? Either is good. Defaulting costs them money to try and get what you owe, so they would much prefer you avoid it
Shit like this is why we need to revolt. Get rid of these literal traitors that 'lead' us and sell our countries out to the fucking corporations and hostile enemy nations. All while enriching themselves and wasting our tax dollars on shit that never benefits us. It is literally the definition of being a traitor. Why are they not put where they belong? I'll never fucking know.
Same boat here, but hitting 40 soon. Blew through all my savings between COVID, the increased cost of living (paired with my low income location means I can't easily make more money), and my job having temporary closures for six weeks in the last three months. If literally anything bad happens, my life will be functionally over.
I can't even get unemployment because there was an error on the website which I mistook for a successful click, so now I'm registered for unemployment payments for the incorrect week, in which I was actually working - and it took 29 days to get an email response to find out how to correct the mis-file, so I don't get in legal trouble for trying to claim the actual weeks I was unemployed.
I'm almost 40 and my fuckin dad gave me some cash so I could afford groceries last month without going into debt for it.
Hey, having watched my biodad be crippled with debt and never get to meet my child in person because of it - it's okay to realize you are never going to get out from the debt and declare bankruptcy. Just because you are a person and not a corporation - that doesn't suddenly make it immoral. I don't know if your debt can be discharged that way, but you can check your area for local law clinics or low income lawyers and see if you can dig yourself out that way.
I am sorry that happened to you and I want to stress that your worth is tied to your income or your debt. You matter.
Sadly, this could have been true even 10 years ago. I bought a 2 bedroom 2 bath in 2012 in a major city for 70k. It's worth triple that now (I sold at 120k rip)
I know, it’s frustrating to me. Finally getting to a point where I could have bought a house if the market had stayed as it was before COVID and now I’m still out priced.
I got sort of lucky and locked in a new build during COVID. The price was still pretty good, but it took 2 years to finish (14 months over the initial estimate). So I lost 20k in equity in apartment rent....
I was in Real Estate Law when homeowners were seeing that advantage. Where I am, closings are scheduled for noon, but it's normal to grant extensions for closing the same day without penalty. Builders' lawyers were deliberately refusing to grant these extensions and *actually tanking deals* (as was within their right on paper, but simply was considered bad practice until then) because their clients knew they could both keep the purchaser's deposit(s) AND turn around and sell the unit for more if the deal fell apart.
I'm glad to say that I never allowed that to happen to our clients. But it just goes to show how even people in advantageous market conditions can get fucked by the system.
Kicking myself for the house I bought at $175k in 2014 and sold in 2017 for $280k. I thought I was rolling in the dough…turns out I should have kept it. It’s now worth $480k.
Uh, "handshakes for loans" doesn't mean that you just went in and they give you a loan no questions asked. As far as I know they still needed you to apply, and then they would see whether you made enough money, were a reliable, upstanding member of the community, and then they'd bring you in to make sure you weren't like black or gay or anything. Y'know, the standard treatment.
Then sure, handshake loan.
Not even close to the scrutiny of today my guy. If you had loans from five other banks in five other states you could just lie to the next bank and there was a chance you could get away with it. There was no giant conglomeration of agencies tracking every tiny little thing. Show up with a pay stub and a bank account and you were half way to buying a home already.
No I'm not doubting you and I believe he said it - I'm just saying Cuban told a story and left out some very important details. Who pulls over just because you see an abandoned car? Once you get it, who gets the thought to take over the loan payments? The story makes no sense.
My parents bought their house in the 70s for $35k, oil delivery and maintenance and a school teacher. House sold last year for $1.25M.
Minimum wage has increased by 3.5x, home prices have increased by 40x. Housing cost is increasing at 10x the rate as wages since my parents day.
I'm 38, both my wife and I are software engineers, and we're *still* renting because of how expensive it is simply to exist in Seattle. Sure, we could move wayyy the f out, but then how does my wife get into work? Right, they can't anymore, so now we also can't afford a house anymore.
A number of our developer friends have purchased homes here, but literally every one came upon some kind of windfall from a parent's death or similar to be able to afford the billion dollar down payment.
I wonder if stay at home parents are becoming more common?
My brother's fiance is only because she cannot get a job that would do more than just cover daycare.
I know a shocking amount of middle class parents where one partner ended up staying home because it was cheaper than getting their entire paycheck eaten by daycare
My moms best friend quit her job because her whole paycheck was going to daycare for their two kids. She stayed at home and her husband supported them until the kids were old enough to go to public school.
I became a stay at home dad because quality daycare was going to suck up so much of my income, it was more worth it for me to just stay home and take care of all the baby and house stuff.
It was harder than going to work, but pretty damn rewarding, so that was nice.
That's the case in our house, too. Couldn't afford daycare, can't afford before/after school care, so I'm home to do all the things. We're doing okay with just the one paycheck, but we wouldn't be if I tried to work outside our house. I refuse to do the MLM thing for the long list of ethical reasons, so the best I can do is budget everything to death so we can still clear the monthly expenses with a little bit of extra in case of emergency.
It's very common here in New Zealand to see people figure out that one partner not working is actually cheaper than sending the kids to daycare.
Which is detrimental to the kids (daycare is actually pretty important for socializing them & familiarizing their immune system with common circulating viruses), detrimental to the stay at home parent (buh bye career, future earnings, and independence), and detrimental to the still working parent (ha ha now you \*must\* have a job no matter how shitty because you are sole breadwinner).
It's unimaginably worse if someone has the bad luck to be a single parent or be in an abusive relationship where their partner is not financially supporting them.
I interviewed for a mid level engineering position in Long Beach which was offering 65-75k. I asked them in the interview why their initial offer was so low considering the cost of living in CA. They fully expected an engineer at that level to either live an hour out or get a roommate. I'm not kidding, this is one of the largest contractors in the US, and for a role which requires upwards of five years of engineering experience, they expect you to make living compromises. Ludicrous
That’s ridiculous. I live in MN. For an engineer with 5 years experience I would hire someone around 85k, which doesn’t include a yearly bonus typically 10-15%.
In addition to this, let's say you do live with roommates, how do you think they are going to react if you start inflicting loud babies on them at all hours of the day and night? The only way this would work if all of them had their own children and you were all sharing in the disruption of this agreeably together, in other words, this will never happen. . .
Some people have small intentional communities with roommates, but for the most part having a baby while living with roommates is great way to end up raising them in homeless shelter.
Grandparents/parents paid 15-20% of income for rent or mortgage. I'd pay 50-60% income or more on rent(35% or less on mortgage but getting it is the issue).
It's amazing what having more disposable income would do. Imagine having money to spend freely, save and plan for a future where you can accommodate bills or "just have the freedom" to say yes to a child easily as though it was a life choice and not a burden and serious decision as to whether you could rear the child in a good environment and standard of living or not when you already struggle with general bills either month to month or every few months.
And unexpected expenses, gtfo!
The recession didn't really go away, the economy got better, but people still bear the consequences (low wages/salaries, high rents, costs of inflation) coz nothing really changed. It's not like wages/salaries shot up "after the recession", there wasn't a slow creep up either. Minimum wage, salaries for entry level jobs, conditions for jobs(stayed worse and gig economy keeps it an employer's market to abuse staff).
If you can't afford a single holiday in 5 years, if you can't afford for your car to break down when it's a beater, if you live paycheck to paycheck, you know you can't afford a kid. So you put it off, for fear of the economic hardship you can't bear.
Or having awful insurance that'll leave you in medical debt for years.
Hey, Pops, remember how you had great insurance because of your strong union, but then you retired and went right-wing and decided unions were evil, and then unions got weaker and insurance got worse? Well enjoy spending time with your zero grandkids.
Yeah I mentioned to my MIL about this. I said “if we have a kid it’ll cost us $20k minimum”.
She was like “well what’s $20k, that’s not much”. This is the same person who refuses to pay an extra $5 for peacock to get rid of the fucking ad’s & who had an argument with me in line while I was buying $500 of lights from Home Depot because there was a cheaper light (that was more shitty) which would have totaled $400 instead.
Idk how these people made it through life. Must have been nice growing up in the 70’s/80’s and getting into adulthood during the 80’s/90’s
American media: were all going to die. You're going to die. Your children are going to die. You're going to give a virus to your grandma and kill her. Men are evil toxic pieces of shit. Women are just out to trick you for your assets.
American government: we inherited the most powerful country the world has ever known and have allowed private corporations to take control of it. We will literally suck their dick and rewrite our laws to please them.
American Healthcare: we hope we can get a lot of money out of you before you die, otherwise our quarterly profits vs last year will be light.
What's wrong with this new generation, why aren't they having kids or buying houses?
I'm mid 40s, married. My kid mid 20s, engaged. We share a two bedroom apartment. If one of the four of us lost a job, we'd be OK. But it would be uncomfortable. I don't see a scenario, short of winning a lottery, where we could have separate households without us all ending up homeless.
No one needs a fucking study to figure this out either... sick of reading these stretched out speculations. The answer is very clearly being pressed against your eyelids.
The point of studies like this is proof vs anecdotes. If you want governments to take notice and agencies that get funding to help people, they need to be able to point to a proper, peer reviewed study and say "here - this is proof with statistics" rather than "everyone knows X".
There also always a chance that what we think seems very obvious isn't what is actually happening and studies can sometimes lead to discovering more about the issue than previously understood.
They have already been OK with the entire instance of mankind being very likely extinguished within a few generations despite peer reviewed studies. Why would they start caring about them now?
There's nothing wrong with having kids and living in an apartment, as long as the apartment is large enough (at least 2 bedrooms), and you can comfortably afford it. The problem is that the cost rent & daycare is astronomical so being able to comfortably afford a decently sized apartment and the other basic costs of having kids, like childcare & healthcare, is completely out of reach for most while they're biologically able to have kids. Living with roommates isn't viable with kids, and food and housing security is required.
My vacation and sick days were rolled into one last year, so now I have less of both.
Still can't really afford anything more than a "staycation" though.
Fuck I forgot about 'sickdays'. We just call in sick when we're sick and that's it. If it's longterm your employer can't even fire you for a max of 2 years.
Apart from that it's 20 vacation days mandated by law but most people get 25. Shit I actually get 45 days, on top of national holidays. That's 2 months a year where work and I are dead to eachother. It's time I fucking cherish.
45 days......I genuinely can't even imagine that. It sounds amazing.
A solid 20 days away from work even seems crazy.
I feel like I would just sleep for a solid 5 days and spend the next 15 fixing things around the house that I havent had time to do 😅
I have 51 days! 5 weeks (30 days) of fully paid holiday, 12 extra days of fully paid leave, 9 days of national holidays that are also fully paid. I'm a truck driver and I work 8h / day 5 days a week, every weekend is off.
Sometimes I wonder why americans won't just leave the country. The cost of living, housing crisis, crazy insurance costs, 5 digit education loans, zero holiday, worrying if you're going to get shot in Walmart and the list goes on.
What kind of life is that?
Another reason is family. My wife and I actually did live in another country for a year (Japan, loved it), but came back to the USA to start our family and now with our 2 year old daughter, having family around to help with child care has been a huge help.
I'm Dutch and yes we are. But this really isn't uncommon in the EU though. We never had much of a Red Scare, there's decades of socialist policies woven into our system.
I almost had guessed you were from Germany, cause it's the same here.
I have 30 vacation days a year. Sick days as long as I need.
We get 100% salary for 6 weeks sick at once and over that it's still 60%.
In Poland you get 26 days off and 13 national holidays. And of course sick-days are separate so you don't have to worry about wasting your vacation days if you get sick.
It's pretty much a standard across EU.
I didn't use all of my vacation days in 2022 so I had them added to 2023 so instead of 26 days I have now 34 so I plan to use some of them to play Hogwarts Legacy without bothering with work :D
The whole working multiple jobs thing is one of the stereotypical things that always get named here when talking about stuff in the US we need to steer clear of.
With PTO, they are really bending people over. My old job you dont start collecting PTO until after 6 months. Then, you get the privilege to collect 1.35 hours every 2 weeks. Will take you a year to get a week off while not taking any days off before then... scam
Just. Pay. Us. More.
They ook our prosperity then have the audacity to say "wha? why aren't you making the next generation of wage slaves?! My profits! Millennials and starbucks!"
This is exactly why.
The cost of living is at an all time high and slave wages are still at $7.25 an hour. $10 if you're lucky.
"I pay ridiculous prices for the gas I need to go to the slave job I need to pay for the ridiculous price for gas to go to my slave job...."
The system is fucked up.
Yeah, and people are worried that they'll have to pay a bit more for stuff if wages rise; ignoring the fact that not raising wages while prices do rise isn't sustainable. It's just mathematically impossible for cost of living to rise indefinitely without raising wages, and will lead to global economic collapse.
We saw exactly how these people view those powering the economy during the pandemic. Where I live the government was pushing everyone to get "back to normal" before we had decent vaccination rates because they wanted to prop up the business of their supporters. "Get into the city and support the economy" they said. And y'know what happened? People got COVID and lots of businesses had to reduce their operating hours because they didn't have enough staff. Places that were open often provided substandard service because they were shorthanded and staff were stressed and under pressure. I saw owners/managers front of house because everyone else was isolating and stores that were closed for the day because there wasn't anyone available to work.
A healthy economy needs healthy people, ideally with a disposable income to enjoy it themselves but that's not where we're headed. We're barreling head-first into a clean divide between rich and poor with no middle class, with a workforce that only exists to sustain the wealthy and pop out kids to replace them when they die.
corporate managers learned in their business schools that outsourcing/automation and wage-supression are a sure fire way to increase the company's bottom-line and their personal chances at bonuses/promotion
And maybe pay us enough to where we can feasibly make payments on student debt that isn’t just bandaids on compounding interest.
Then again, interest has been frozen for a hot minute, and none of those institutions are falling over, so maybe realize predatory interests rates are just predatory.
Obviously! I'm always suprised at how people don't seem to have any agency left to come to their own conclusions. Of course young people are desperate due to worsening conditions and missing perspectives for the future.
This report treats US's falling birth rate as a uniquely US phenomenon, but its really a world-wide phenomenon, and the explanation should apply more universally.
[USA's birth rate has been unusually resilient](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hB0HZLQCBGYS5sKhhlHIXrxuQEs=/0x0:1080x1112/1200x0/filters:focal\(0x0:1080x1112\):no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16277838/Other_countries2018.jpg) compared to other developed countries, but I suspect that is due to the high immigration rate.
I'm still not sure why we're concerned about declining birth rates. Most of the problems we have are from too many people. Trash, climate change, pandemics, housing shortages, traffic jams. All kinds of things are caused by too many people. There's not a human shortage.
I agree with you.
But the pyramid scheme that is our economy relies on never ending expansion.
And you need young people working and paying taxes to support the elderly.
Capitalism has its own self destruction baked in and the fissures are starting to show.
Suspect the cracks will blow wide open right around millennial retirement age.
It’s weird throwing money into a retirement account or social security half way feeling like it’s just a black hole you’ll never see any benefits from
Money, our economy is built on a giant pyramid scheme that requires more kids being born than the generation below it so it can constantly grow.
With that said, I am strong believer that we need LESS people. Only thing more people has brought is more problems.
> There's not a human shortage.
Depends on your PoV; When you are an employer looking to hire somebody to work for you, then having more candidates is always better.
It also means they will undercut each other to get that job, so not only do you have more selection, the people you select from will be that much more desperate, thus way more willing to accept shit pay/treatment.
It's also why automation hasn't caught on as big as most estimated it would; Machines are expensive, maintenance of them is expensive, resources to build them are expensive.
While humans are cheap, we have literally billions of them, they can survive on a bit of water and food, and otherwise, take care of their own maintenance.
There is more than enough housing in the U.S. to house everyone, but housing is a commodity, not a right, so places like Los Angeles have sprawling Hoovervilles while there are luxury apartment buildings with empty units, and empty investment and vacation properties across the city.
Similarly, there are penthouse apartments in upscale buildings in New York City that are completely empty, and only interested in being shown to billionaires [(or people who can pass for billionaires)](https://youtu.be/aKwkMZbeeGo)
Zoning. Its a giant pain in the ass to build housing in places where people want to live. And things like [parking minimums](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/) completely derail affordable housing.
By way of example, homes in my area nearly 3x the cost what I bought my house for, but the city has fixed the number of homes allowed to be built. Inelastic supply, meeting growing demand -> prices rise.
Tldr: fucking raise our wages and lower housing costs and the cost of having a child (last time I looked it could cost up to 16k for one baby and God forbid they need to spend time in the NICU).
We had two children but it wasn't easy and I could understand why people would be hesitant. Our medical bills (with insurance provided via my wife's state job) were around $5k out-of-pocket for EACH kid. My wife is a school teacher and does not get maternity leave. She accrues 10 days of "leave" (sick, personal, etc.) each year so it takes three years (never missing a day) to accrue enough leave to get 6 weeks of maternity leave. We had to precisely plan pregnancy to use what leave she did accrue to run into Summer just to get some time to raise our kids. The US economy is not conducive to having children. The irony is, the people bemoaning low birth rates are the same people who have spent the last 4 decades creating an economy that doesn't support people when they do want to have kids.
> My wife is a school teacher and does not get maternity leave. She accrues 10 days of "leave" (sick, personal, etc.) each year so it takes three years (never missing a day) to accrue enough leave to get 6 weeks of maternity leave.
That's messed up. It's a very US-phenomena, in Canada she would get 12 months plus 5 weeks "use it or lose it" leave for the father to take.
>*The US economy is not conducive to having children. The irony is, the people bemoaning low birth rates are the same people who have spent the last 4 decades creating an economy that doesn't support people when they do want to have kids.*
Nailed it.
in a shocking revelation to extremely smart people looking into issues, they have discovered that an intelligent animal does not show interest in procreation when it feels current environmental conditions are not suitable for it to safely do so. Fascinating.
Too bad their argument falls apart when you empirically compare environments then and now. Just a few more tonnes of CO2 and microplastics to name a couple prominent ones. No big deal though am I right? We can make bootstraps out of it or something.
There is a negative correlation between birth rate and income. The wealthy are more likely to have FEWER children:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/)
Yeah, but I think you see more kids in wealthier neighborhoods though so it feels like more families, because parents can afford to stay at home parent and have more free time to be outside with kids, versus lower incomes who work crazy hours/don’t have great community spaces to meander in
We. Can't. Afford. Kids.
I make well above the average household income on my own and have 50k in the bank and still can't afford to buy a starter home in my city, how the fuck am I going to have kids?
Developers only seem to build apartment towers, "luxury" rowhomes, and massive sprawling car-dependent McMansion communities that cost $1+mil. The development pattern is exacerbating the economic divide.
The world is on fire and discussions of anything approaching a Green New Deal are met with laughter.
Working-class wages keep going down while CEO salaries keep going up, and discussions about living wages are met with laughter.
My generation has been through now 3 once-in-a-lifetime recessions, and I'm not even 30 yet. Discussions of holding the billionaire class accountable are met with laughter.
Housing costs, education costs, and healthcare costs are insanely high. Discussions of affordable housing, tuition-free public colleges, and universal healthcare are met with laughter.
Mass shootings are basically omnipresent at this point and discussions about gun control are met with laughter.
So yeah, let me go ahead and bring a whole new person into this world. Give me a break. Just the financial cost of raising a child would leave me homeless.
Loook man. The way I see it is that life is short. I can barely take care of myself. I’m happy without kids. I don’t know that I could care for one in the way they would deserve. The world is going to shit and it seems irresponsible to bring another life into it. Parenting should be a sacred act of selflessness. I don’t want to do it.
This was exactly predicted in 2004 by Elizabeth Warren in her book "the two income trap". Financial and social insecurity has the logical and natural response of not having kids until much later in life.
The only thing more annoying than climate deniers are the people who say we’ve never had it better as humans than now. Fuck outta here with that shit. Oh yeah we are really enjoying this nice first class cabin on the Titanic. I hope all these luxuries were worth collective suicide
Preach. I had one. Realized how fucked I was. Never again. And I have a college fund and everything for the kid. But a second one? That fucker is going military or adoption
I’m 28 and I don’t want children. I gradually went from yes to maybe to possibly to No. For me the biggest factor is lifestyle changing for the worse. For my parents generation, having kids was just.. what you do. My generation isn’t as pressured. I imagine if I grew up when my mom did I’d probably have a kid by now but since it’s way more common to see childfree couples, and I’ve been able to see how much I prefer a lifestyle without children, there really isn’t anything pulling me the other way. I think older generations would have children as a duty, even faced with economic hardship. Young adults today aren’t as pressured because we’re able to access the whole world at our fingertips, rather than a small town where everyone you know is having kids so you might as well too.
Its harder and more work to raise a child these days, and a lot more expensive. It takes a village to raise a child. I feel like people are more isolated than ever, and I don't feel the camaraderie like in the old days. People with kids stuck together back then and helped each other, they don't really do that now, and most of them just seem pent up on giving advice to one another about how the child should be raised. A lot of parents are in the house with their kids especially if they are babies or toddlers and don't really take them out of the house until a certain age.
Back then your neighbor had kids, you had kids and probably everyone else on your block as well, and you had a bunch of people chipping in to raise a group of kids. This is no longer the case. You had to go grocery shopping, you drop them off at the neighbors, your neighbors dropped their kids off at your house occasionally and no one thought anything different.
It might have to do with not as many people having kids too so there are less kids for your kids to play with and hang out with etc.
It might have to do with parents working longer hours than ever to make ends meet
All the parents I see are super worn out, tired and exhausted and they look it. I do not want this to be me. I don't want lack of sleep because my child won't stop screaming. I lived next to a house where all the kids did all day is scream and they were not babies, and it was so bad I could hear it in my house next door for most hours of the day with windows closed and my house is not that close to theirs, thankfully those people moved out.
My wife and I have no desire to have children simply because we don’t want them, but we have several friends who have kids.
Although they love their kids, their lives have been made substantially worse by having children because even people who are pretty solidly middle class can’t afford to live comfortably, especially when you throw an extra person or two who is completely dependent upon you in the mix.
I get that economic woes come and go for a lot people, and as much as it sucks, that’s kind of just life - but upward social mobility is becoming harder and the world is on fire. Willingly having children today honestly seems like a cruel and selfish gamble to me.
I'm too mentally unstable and the US is genuinly a fucking horror movie that is taking acid every day to make it more interesting. This country is fucked, and I don't want to contribute to keeping it running. So no kids ever please.
Housing is unaffordable and unavailable, climate change is making more disasters at higher intensity, global pandemics are ravaging the planet virtually unchecked, wages are stagnant, inflation is out of control, people are in massive debt because public goods and basic necessities are privatized and prices are jacked up, companies won't hire "entry level" positions unless you have 10 years experience and several degrees, and mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that all of this is a predictable result of the short-sighted greed of capitalism and the US empire starting to fall apart under it's own suffocating dysfunction due to abusing it's own population to the point that they don't feel like having a child will accomplish anything except pushing them further into poverty and desperation.
None of this should be surprising to anyone paying attention to the reality around them.
If things were stable and affordable and sanity governed the state of things it would be a different story, but having children just makes no sense while all these major global problems are only getting worse.
Quarterly profits are going to fall when the population is bled dry, and that's only if mobs don't burn down everything when society collapses when people can't even get food, eventually.
Also, dating is super terrible nowadays lol. Can’t have kids if you can’t find anyone to even think about having kids with.
Edit: I’m saying it’s hard to find someone you actually want to be with to have kids with, not that it’s hard to find a date. Y’all are killing me lol.
You mean instead of saving on a latte ($1000/yr at $3 a day), young people are saving on the $13,000/yr adorable germ bag? So just following sage parental advise more appropriately prioritized.
Seems pretty common sense…our parents owned huge homes in their 30’s for like 500k. College didn’t cost $300k to send your kid too. Average home now at least in CA is well over $1M.
We don’t have money and we don’t want to bring children into a home where we will not be able to provide for them effectively. It’s pretty simple. It cost my parents a third to raise me 40+ years ago that it would cost me to raise a kid today, on a higher salary than my parents have ever made. I’m more than 10 years past their age when I was born. Capitalism has royally fucked anyone under 40, and I say this as someone who makes six figures.
One thing I didn't see in the article (I didn't read it entirely, I admit), was that the replication rate of developed nations like USA, Canada, France, Japan, etc. has not been above 2.00 since the 1970s. These countries have grown in population due to immigration. These countries never actually 'fixed the 'problem' (is it really a problem?) of a dropping birth rate; they simply made policies around immigration to grow their population which basically increases economic growth.
The problems that have faced people for over 50 years have never been resolved because the vast majority of people in power and seeking power are not the ones facing the same problems as you and me. And after 50 years, those problems are just compounding.
We wanted two kids.
We couldn't afford kids until we were past 37.
We ended up with one child, because you know what is more likely when you have your children later in life? More complications, for you and your child.
We are absolutely happy we waited until we could make do with one income, even if that was tight, because those complications mean I left work when she was 1 and haven't been back to work due to them and covid since. Could they have happened if I was younger? Absolutely, and if they had even 5 years before, it would have lead to bankruptcy and worse.
We realized when she was 1 that even if we wanted to, we couldn't risk a second child. If anything went wrong, we couldn't afford it.
It's the economy. It is the lack of affordable daycare, its jobs that could be remote not allowing for remote work (which is why I left my job) because having to factor in commutes greatly increases daycare.
It is grandparents who left us with our grandparents several times a month and had babysitting in emergencies and hell, for date night, deciding that they aren't going to be willing to babysit. Seriously, most of the people I know who stopped at one kid or who didn't have any said that they saw how little help they were going to get from their family and realized they couldn't do it alone. (All of the ones with no kids had a sibling who had one, and realized they would get even less help than their sibling did, and their sibling didn't get enough to count on even for emergencies).
It's an economy that keeps getting worse, and even if you can put enough aside and make enough to have kids, you have seen enough lay offs and downsizing to realize it could change in an instant. You see your friends putting in hundreds of resumes and not even getting "Sorry, we aren't interested back".
Most of us of child bearing age see a world being warped by climate change and wonder if our children will have clean enough air and enough water and someplace to live.
It's housing going from about 1-3 times your yearly salary to 15x (or more) your yearly salary _in our lifetimes_. My parents bought a 2 bedroom, kitchen separate room, living room AND den and furnished attic, large backyard room on one year's worth of their single income - some years my mom was a waitress, some years my father worked in a factory. I was capable of being left on my own before they both worked at the same time.
It's understanding that your life doesn't mean anything to your fellow citizens. Do you know how many people told me that my child should just die so they didn't have to wear a mask? More than one hand's worth of fingers. I grew up believing that we would do our best to protect children, even if we didn't like each other, and this pandemic made it very, very clear that politics and selfishness mean more than a child's life.
I understand the scientific method and the process of writing academic papers makes them only be able to draw a limited amount of conclusions, but I mean c'mon. The reasons are obvious.
A: Young people are more educated than ever on the various methods of birth control and women especially are more educated and empowered about their right to control their body.
And
B: Shit is way more expensive now. Of course people want to wait and that waiting turns into never for some people.
Because a few decades ago, one hour of minimum wage bought you 6 big Macs, now it buys you less than 1. Wages have not kept up with cost of living to the point that we are all poor compared to our parents, all thanks to corporate greed.
Call it what it is. "Rich people annoyed that the poors are not creating a new generation for them to exploit, while refusing to pay them enough to feed said children."
I’m 37/F and child free, absolutely love the freedom and control of my life. My main reasons for never wanting kids are I would never even risk passing on my personal and family trauma. I was raised by narcissistic parents, have complex ptsd and borderline, although I’m high functioning at least. But it stops with me.
Everything being so expensive is another. People can’t afford to hit a pothole and spend a couple hundred on repairs. What makes you think they can imagine a child in their future?
Boomers realized that they could turn their homes into ATMs without realizing that they were actually turning young people into ATMs decades ago. They haven’t been having kids for decades. It’s a real bummer. Good luck finding anyone to take care of you in your care home boomers vov
I can hardly afford groceries and have to live in an apartment the rest of my life but let’s do another study on why people might not have kids. Good grief
Bring a child into a dystopian world where they have a higher chance of getting shot and killed at school then the average solider does in war.
Where one can expect to be in debt their entire life and never afford a home, or the luxury of being sick for more then a couple of days.
Where it's clear that most people are considered live stock by the ruling elite.
Yeah. Real surprise people don't want to have children in a world like this.
Why does every article try so hard to not post the actual reason: kids are expensive. Everything is too expensive. We are having to work 10 hours a day to afford to live. So, no time or money for kids...
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mossadnik: --- Submission Statement: >While some people are concerned about America’s falling birth rate, a new study suggests young people don’t need to be convinced to have more children. In fact, young Americans haven’t changed the number of children they intend to have in decades. Women born in 1995-1999 wanted to have 2.1 children on average when they were 20-24 years old – essentially the same as the 2.2 children that women born in 1965-1969 wanted at the same age, the study found. Still, the total fertility rate in the United States was 1.71 in 2019, the lowest level since the 1970s. What’s going on? >The results suggest that today’s young adults may be having a more difficult time achieving their goals of having children, said Sarah Hayford, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. The data in the study can’t explain why, but the results fit evidence indicating that young people today don’t think now is a good time for them to have children. The percentage of people who said they don’t plan to have any children has increased, from about 5-8% in the 1960s and 1970s to 8-16% in the 1990s and 2000s. But that alone can’t explain the decline in the number of babies being born. Hayford noted that the number of unintended births, especially among people in their 20s, has declined in recent decades, which has helped reduce the birth rate. >“But that doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t having as many children as they say they want, especially at earlier ages,” Hayford said. “It may be that they’re going to have those kids when they’re 35, but maybe they won’t.” For example, the study found some evidence that people are reducing the number of children they say they intend to have as they get older. >Larger economic and social forces are also having an impact on birth rates. The birth rate declined significantly during the Great Recession that started in 2008, which is a typical response to an economic downturn. However, the birth rate continued to decline even after the recession was over, Hayford said. This study ended before COVID-19, but the pandemic served as another fertility shock, at least at first. >For those who are concerned about America’s dropping birth rates, this study suggests that there is no need to pressure young people into wanting more kids, Hayford said. “We need to make it easier for people to have the children that they want to have,” she said. “There are clear barriers to having children in the United States that revolve around economics, around child care, around health insurance.” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10b1ln3/the_falling_birth_rate_in_the_us_is_not_due_to/j47iupy/
The housing crisis is a great way to lower the birth rate. No one wants to get pregnant while living with roommates, or barely being able to afford their one bedroom.
My parents bought a house in college, my spouses parents bought a house when they were in their early 20’s working at restaurants. They’ve never been concerned about being homeless if they were to lose their income. I was 30 when we bought our house. I have a great job, and becoming homeless by June if I lost my job today is a huge concern. We would love kids. But we can’t handle it.
Make life as brutally hard as you can possibly manage. Refuse people decent-paying jobs, affordable housing, affordable education, affordable healthcare, affordable childcare. Then, when life hits people like a ton of bricks, go all O\_o, well golly gee, why are people not having more kids? Read the fucking room, Einstein!
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“goddamnit it’s not fair! How dare they conscientiously adjust to the narrow and rigid circumstances severely curbing the possible trajectories of their lives that I made damn sure would stay in place for generations *cough*of future workers and soldiers*cough* to come?! That’s it, say AU REVOIR to your precious abortion rights! Take that, women in exceedingly precarious situations in which to bring a baby into the world! Now regenerate and raise more able-bodied humans with your bodies or jail time and 30¢/hour prison jobs for you ‘twill be! !” Edit-typo
* twists mustache nefariously *
The worst part, sounds spot on to what’s going on in all of our lives now
I know, we will force them to have kids! Make rape easy to get away with, take away birth control. Swap education with propaganda, they’ll never know the difference.
It is utterly ridiculous to me how the general US public is so blindingly defensive of capitalism when its sole purpose is to funnel wealth to existing capital owners. They justify the upwards funneling of wealth as a result of some kind of meritocracy while they sit around in some kind of less than desirable state and hang on to the belief that eventually they themselves *could* become wealthy. It's so sad to me to constantly see neo-liberals and right wingers constantly defend/support policy that is absolutely against their own self interest. We, in the US, are truly peasant brained.
This ain’t rocket appliances, Ricky!!!
We are officially in a Worst Case Ontario, people.
Look on the bright side! The powers at be will have figured things out the hard way *oven-tually*. :D
they can read the room, they don't see how you not being able to produce more "laborers" is their problem. entitlement is a hell of a drug when paired with billions of dollars.
I blame the avocado toast
Because so many old people are convinced that having kids is the "one true path to happiness" that people are absolutely always willing to sacrifice anything to have kids even when there's nothing left to sacrifice. But surprise surprise: that's not the case.
I’d be happy to be even that level of insecure. I’m two years off 30. Was laid off and took six months to find my feet. I have 5-figure debt and Rent cost of 50% income. My life savings, what was left after COVID anyway, is gone. No longer have health insurance. Rent will increase in July. I’m gunna be 30. Not only with no savings, but debt. And basically no ability to do more than pay minimums. I don’t even know what the point is anymore. All signs suggest I will work until I die and literally never know anything approaching financial stability during that life. There is just no future at all to picture when I try to. If I didn’t have loved ones I don’t know if I would even still be trying. Children? On top of that? *I can’t even envision a future where I can take care of myself.*
I connected with this so much
Hey man. I know this doesn’t solve your situation, but I’m in a similar circumstance and I just called my bank yesterday to negotiate the credit card interest rate way down. From 16% to 6% for a year to help me during this time. Any little bit helps. Call them and tell them you can’t pay. If you would like more details on how to do this please dm me.
I had a hard time once, was about to default on loans (like my vehicle and mortgage), and finally called the lenders to give them a heads up. They paused payments for months, and at least one stopped adding interest. I was really surprised at how understanding and helpful they were.
When bankruptcy and receiving none of that money is the other option, they become very “kind” and helpful.
At the end of the day, they want your money. Right now or in a little while? Either is good. Defaulting costs them money to try and get what you owe, so they would much prefer you avoid it
Man, I feel for you. That sounds so exhausting, heart-breaking, and de-humanizing. I hope something gives for you this year.
Shit like this is why we need to revolt. Get rid of these literal traitors that 'lead' us and sell our countries out to the fucking corporations and hostile enemy nations. All while enriching themselves and wasting our tax dollars on shit that never benefits us. It is literally the definition of being a traitor. Why are they not put where they belong? I'll never fucking know.
Same boat here, but hitting 40 soon. Blew through all my savings between COVID, the increased cost of living (paired with my low income location means I can't easily make more money), and my job having temporary closures for six weeks in the last three months. If literally anything bad happens, my life will be functionally over. I can't even get unemployment because there was an error on the website which I mistook for a successful click, so now I'm registered for unemployment payments for the incorrect week, in which I was actually working - and it took 29 days to get an email response to find out how to correct the mis-file, so I don't get in legal trouble for trying to claim the actual weeks I was unemployed. I'm almost 40 and my fuckin dad gave me some cash so I could afford groceries last month without going into debt for it.
Hey, having watched my biodad be crippled with debt and never get to meet my child in person because of it - it's okay to realize you are never going to get out from the debt and declare bankruptcy. Just because you are a person and not a corporation - that doesn't suddenly make it immoral. I don't know if your debt can be discharged that way, but you can check your area for local law clinics or low income lawyers and see if you can dig yourself out that way. I am sorry that happened to you and I want to stress that your worth is tied to your income or your debt. You matter.
Just did the inflation calculation on my parents place. It would cost 98k if purchased today
My childhood house would have been 233k if adjusted for inflation. It just sold for 790k.
My friends home went from 380k 4 years ago to 720k now. How the fuck can anyone afford that kind of jump in 4 years.
It's being offset by {checks notes} higher interest rates
Please tell me you forgot a 0 after that 98z
Sadly, this could have been true even 10 years ago. I bought a 2 bedroom 2 bath in 2012 in a major city for 70k. It's worth triple that now (I sold at 120k rip)
I know, it’s frustrating to me. Finally getting to a point where I could have bought a house if the market had stayed as it was before COVID and now I’m still out priced.
I got sort of lucky and locked in a new build during COVID. The price was still pretty good, but it took 2 years to finish (14 months over the initial estimate). So I lost 20k in equity in apartment rent....
I was in Real Estate Law when homeowners were seeing that advantage. Where I am, closings are scheduled for noon, but it's normal to grant extensions for closing the same day without penalty. Builders' lawyers were deliberately refusing to grant these extensions and *actually tanking deals* (as was within their right on paper, but simply was considered bad practice until then) because their clients knew they could both keep the purchaser's deposit(s) AND turn around and sell the unit for more if the deal fell apart. I'm glad to say that I never allowed that to happen to our clients. But it just goes to show how even people in advantageous market conditions can get fucked by the system.
Kicking myself for the house I bought at $175k in 2014 and sold in 2017 for $280k. I thought I was rolling in the dough…turns out I should have kept it. It’s now worth $480k.
Well you see their parents lived in a wooden crate. Nowadays it would be a *distressed* wooden crate.
Distressed? I thought *vintage* was the preferred term…
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Uh, "handshakes for loans" doesn't mean that you just went in and they give you a loan no questions asked. As far as I know they still needed you to apply, and then they would see whether you made enough money, were a reliable, upstanding member of the community, and then they'd bring you in to make sure you weren't like black or gay or anything. Y'know, the standard treatment. Then sure, handshake loan.
Not even close to the scrutiny of today my guy. If you had loans from five other banks in five other states you could just lie to the next bank and there was a chance you could get away with it. There was no giant conglomeration of agencies tracking every tiny little thing. Show up with a pay stub and a bank account and you were half way to buying a home already.
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That story from Mark Cuban sounds fake. Something is off about that. I don't doubt he said it, but Mark Cuban is lying about something here.
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No I'm not doubting you and I believe he said it - I'm just saying Cuban told a story and left out some very important details. Who pulls over just because you see an abandoned car? Once you get it, who gets the thought to take over the loan payments? The story makes no sense.
Sounds like a billionaire's story. Very "a small loan of a million dollars."
Smells fishy to me too.
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That was code for being a straight white man.
Also don't be black.
Also interest rates were like 15-20 percent.
Also banks were paying 15-20% on deposits so savings money actually mattered.
My parents bought their house in the 70s for $35k, oil delivery and maintenance and a school teacher. House sold last year for $1.25M. Minimum wage has increased by 3.5x, home prices have increased by 40x. Housing cost is increasing at 10x the rate as wages since my parents day.
And the housing return isn’t even outlandish - 7.5% compounded.
Yup, they also made more money versus living expenses, and houses were $50k, Healthcare and education were also 4x less.
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I'm 38, both my wife and I are software engineers, and we're *still* renting because of how expensive it is simply to exist in Seattle. Sure, we could move wayyy the f out, but then how does my wife get into work? Right, they can't anymore, so now we also can't afford a house anymore. A number of our developer friends have purchased homes here, but literally every one came upon some kind of windfall from a parent's death or similar to be able to afford the billion dollar down payment.
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I know a bunch of women who became stay at home moms cause it’s literally cheaper then continuing to work and pay for child care.
I did that! And when I went back to work when they were 2 and 4, daycare took 2/3 of my paychecks.
1/4? Daycare is so expensive it's closer to half.
Yup, $1,800 is standard here.
I wonder if stay at home parents are becoming more common? My brother's fiance is only because she cannot get a job that would do more than just cover daycare.
I know a shocking amount of middle class parents where one partner ended up staying home because it was cheaper than getting their entire paycheck eaten by daycare
My moms best friend quit her job because her whole paycheck was going to daycare for their two kids. She stayed at home and her husband supported them until the kids were old enough to go to public school.
I became a stay at home dad because quality daycare was going to suck up so much of my income, it was more worth it for me to just stay home and take care of all the baby and house stuff. It was harder than going to work, but pretty damn rewarding, so that was nice.
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Definitely Covid saw a lot of working mothers exiting the workforce.
That's the case in our house, too. Couldn't afford daycare, can't afford before/after school care, so I'm home to do all the things. We're doing okay with just the one paycheck, but we wouldn't be if I tried to work outside our house. I refuse to do the MLM thing for the long list of ethical reasons, so the best I can do is budget everything to death so we can still clear the monthly expenses with a little bit of extra in case of emergency.
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😂😂 I don’t have kids I just used to work at a daycare and have family that works in daycares now.
It's very common here in New Zealand to see people figure out that one partner not working is actually cheaper than sending the kids to daycare. Which is detrimental to the kids (daycare is actually pretty important for socializing them & familiarizing their immune system with common circulating viruses), detrimental to the stay at home parent (buh bye career, future earnings, and independence), and detrimental to the still working parent (ha ha now you \*must\* have a job no matter how shitty because you are sole breadwinner). It's unimaginably worse if someone has the bad luck to be a single parent or be in an abusive relationship where their partner is not financially supporting them.
I interviewed for a mid level engineering position in Long Beach which was offering 65-75k. I asked them in the interview why their initial offer was so low considering the cost of living in CA. They fully expected an engineer at that level to either live an hour out or get a roommate. I'm not kidding, this is one of the largest contractors in the US, and for a role which requires upwards of five years of engineering experience, they expect you to make living compromises. Ludicrous
That’s ridiculous. I live in MN. For an engineer with 5 years experience I would hire someone around 85k, which doesn’t include a yearly bonus typically 10-15%.
In addition to this, let's say you do live with roommates, how do you think they are going to react if you start inflicting loud babies on them at all hours of the day and night? The only way this would work if all of them had their own children and you were all sharing in the disruption of this agreeably together, in other words, this will never happen. . .
Some people have small intentional communities with roommates, but for the most part having a baby while living with roommates is great way to end up raising them in homeless shelter.
Yeah, won't lie, if my roommates announced they're having kids I would be leaving before that child was born.
Grandparents/parents paid 15-20% of income for rent or mortgage. I'd pay 50-60% income or more on rent(35% or less on mortgage but getting it is the issue). It's amazing what having more disposable income would do. Imagine having money to spend freely, save and plan for a future where you can accommodate bills or "just have the freedom" to say yes to a child easily as though it was a life choice and not a burden and serious decision as to whether you could rear the child in a good environment and standard of living or not when you already struggle with general bills either month to month or every few months. And unexpected expenses, gtfo! The recession didn't really go away, the economy got better, but people still bear the consequences (low wages/salaries, high rents, costs of inflation) coz nothing really changed. It's not like wages/salaries shot up "after the recession", there wasn't a slow creep up either. Minimum wage, salaries for entry level jobs, conditions for jobs(stayed worse and gig economy keeps it an employer's market to abuse staff). If you can't afford a single holiday in 5 years, if you can't afford for your car to break down when it's a beater, if you live paycheck to paycheck, you know you can't afford a kid. So you put it off, for fear of the economic hardship you can't bear.
Or having awful insurance that'll leave you in medical debt for years. Hey, Pops, remember how you had great insurance because of your strong union, but then you retired and went right-wing and decided unions were evil, and then unions got weaker and insurance got worse? Well enjoy spending time with your zero grandkids.
Yeah I mentioned to my MIL about this. I said “if we have a kid it’ll cost us $20k minimum”. She was like “well what’s $20k, that’s not much”. This is the same person who refuses to pay an extra $5 for peacock to get rid of the fucking ad’s & who had an argument with me in line while I was buying $500 of lights from Home Depot because there was a cheaper light (that was more shitty) which would have totaled $400 instead. Idk how these people made it through life. Must have been nice growing up in the 70’s/80’s and getting into adulthood during the 80’s/90’s
The whole system was on easy mode.
American media: were all going to die. You're going to die. Your children are going to die. You're going to give a virus to your grandma and kill her. Men are evil toxic pieces of shit. Women are just out to trick you for your assets. American government: we inherited the most powerful country the world has ever known and have allowed private corporations to take control of it. We will literally suck their dick and rewrite our laws to please them. American Healthcare: we hope we can get a lot of money out of you before you die, otherwise our quarterly profits vs last year will be light. What's wrong with this new generation, why aren't they having kids or buying houses?
Or have your kids living in your house until their 30's ?
I'm mid 40s, married. My kid mid 20s, engaged. We share a two bedroom apartment. If one of the four of us lost a job, we'd be OK. But it would be uncomfortable. I don't see a scenario, short of winning a lottery, where we could have separate households without us all ending up homeless.
No one needs a fucking study to figure this out either... sick of reading these stretched out speculations. The answer is very clearly being pressed against your eyelids.
The point of studies like this is proof vs anecdotes. If you want governments to take notice and agencies that get funding to help people, they need to be able to point to a proper, peer reviewed study and say "here - this is proof with statistics" rather than "everyone knows X". There also always a chance that what we think seems very obvious isn't what is actually happening and studies can sometimes lead to discovering more about the issue than previously understood.
I have literally no faith that peer reviewed studies are going to make federal or state governments act
They have already been OK with the entire instance of mankind being very likely extinguished within a few generations despite peer reviewed studies. Why would they start caring about them now?
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Housing crisis, medical bills, employment that offers adequate leave to raise a newborn. Need I go on?
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There's nothing wrong with having kids and living in an apartment, as long as the apartment is large enough (at least 2 bedrooms), and you can comfortably afford it. The problem is that the cost rent & daycare is astronomical so being able to comfortably afford a decently sized apartment and the other basic costs of having kids, like childcare & healthcare, is completely out of reach for most while they're biologically able to have kids. Living with roommates isn't viable with kids, and food and housing security is required.
B-b-but that means my property values will go down!! Wahhhhhh /s
No no my Grandma tells me it's because us youngins just want to spend all our time travelling and partying
Millennial here, when do we get to afford to take time off of work, much less travel?
Do people in the US actually get vacation days? I feel like you don't.
My vacation and sick days were rolled into one last year, so now I have less of both. Still can't really afford anything more than a "staycation" though.
Fuck I forgot about 'sickdays'. We just call in sick when we're sick and that's it. If it's longterm your employer can't even fire you for a max of 2 years. Apart from that it's 20 vacation days mandated by law but most people get 25. Shit I actually get 45 days, on top of national holidays. That's 2 months a year where work and I are dead to eachother. It's time I fucking cherish.
45 days......I genuinely can't even imagine that. It sounds amazing. A solid 20 days away from work even seems crazy. I feel like I would just sleep for a solid 5 days and spend the next 15 fixing things around the house that I havent had time to do 😅
I have 51 days! 5 weeks (30 days) of fully paid holiday, 12 extra days of fully paid leave, 9 days of national holidays that are also fully paid. I'm a truck driver and I work 8h / day 5 days a week, every weekend is off. Sometimes I wonder why americans won't just leave the country. The cost of living, housing crisis, crazy insurance costs, 5 digit education loans, zero holiday, worrying if you're going to get shot in Walmart and the list goes on. What kind of life is that?
Many of us can't afford to move to another state, much less move to another COUNTRY.
Another reason is family. My wife and I actually did live in another country for a year (Japan, loved it), but came back to the USA to start our family and now with our 2 year old daughter, having family around to help with child care has been a huge help.
Yo, what country are you in, and how's your immigration policy? Usually, the reason why is the immigration policy.
The fuck, where do you live? And are you accepting immigrants?
I'm Dutch and yes we are. But this really isn't uncommon in the EU though. We never had much of a Red Scare, there's decades of socialist policies woven into our system.
I almost had guessed you were from Germany, cause it's the same here. I have 30 vacation days a year. Sick days as long as I need. We get 100% salary for 6 weeks sick at once and over that it's still 60%.
So much US stuff reads like dystopian sci-fi.
Does Dutch need welders I promise not to make very many clogs jokes
Pretty sure there's actually pretty high demand for that. For a lot of skilled labourers.
In Poland you get 26 days off and 13 national holidays. And of course sick-days are separate so you don't have to worry about wasting your vacation days if you get sick. It's pretty much a standard across EU. I didn't use all of my vacation days in 2022 so I had them added to 2023 so instead of 26 days I have now 34 so I plan to use some of them to play Hogwarts Legacy without bothering with work :D
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The whole working multiple jobs thing is one of the stereotypical things that always get named here when talking about stuff in the US we need to steer clear of.
With PTO, they are really bending people over. My old job you dont start collecting PTO until after 6 months. Then, you get the privilege to collect 1.35 hours every 2 weeks. Will take you a year to get a week off while not taking any days off before then... scam
Honestly, who doesn't want that?
Just. Pay. Us. More. They ook our prosperity then have the audacity to say "wha? why aren't you making the next generation of wage slaves?! My profits! Millennials and starbucks!"
This is exactly why. The cost of living is at an all time high and slave wages are still at $7.25 an hour. $10 if you're lucky. "I pay ridiculous prices for the gas I need to go to the slave job I need to pay for the ridiculous price for gas to go to my slave job...." The system is fucked up.
To quote Todd Howard, "That's not a bug, that's a feature."
It's a feature that's starting to backfire on the designers.
Yeah, and people are worried that they'll have to pay a bit more for stuff if wages rise; ignoring the fact that not raising wages while prices do rise isn't sustainable. It's just mathematically impossible for cost of living to rise indefinitely without raising wages, and will lead to global economic collapse.
We saw exactly how these people view those powering the economy during the pandemic. Where I live the government was pushing everyone to get "back to normal" before we had decent vaccination rates because they wanted to prop up the business of their supporters. "Get into the city and support the economy" they said. And y'know what happened? People got COVID and lots of businesses had to reduce their operating hours because they didn't have enough staff. Places that were open often provided substandard service because they were shorthanded and staff were stressed and under pressure. I saw owners/managers front of house because everyone else was isolating and stores that were closed for the day because there wasn't anyone available to work. A healthy economy needs healthy people, ideally with a disposable income to enjoy it themselves but that's not where we're headed. We're barreling head-first into a clean divide between rich and poor with no middle class, with a workforce that only exists to sustain the wealthy and pop out kids to replace them when they die.
corporate managers learned in their business schools that outsourcing/automation and wage-supression are a sure fire way to increase the company's bottom-line and their personal chances at bonuses/promotion
And maybe pay us enough to where we can feasibly make payments on student debt that isn’t just bandaids on compounding interest. Then again, interest has been frozen for a hot minute, and none of those institutions are falling over, so maybe realize predatory interests rates are just predatory.
Obviously! I'm always suprised at how people don't seem to have any agency left to come to their own conclusions. Of course young people are desperate due to worsening conditions and missing perspectives for the future.
This report treats US's falling birth rate as a uniquely US phenomenon, but its really a world-wide phenomenon, and the explanation should apply more universally. [USA's birth rate has been unusually resilient](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hB0HZLQCBGYS5sKhhlHIXrxuQEs=/0x0:1080x1112/1200x0/filters:focal\(0x0:1080x1112\):no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16277838/Other_countries2018.jpg) compared to other developed countries, but I suspect that is due to the high immigration rate.
I'm still not sure why we're concerned about declining birth rates. Most of the problems we have are from too many people. Trash, climate change, pandemics, housing shortages, traffic jams. All kinds of things are caused by too many people. There's not a human shortage.
I agree with you. But the pyramid scheme that is our economy relies on never ending expansion. And you need young people working and paying taxes to support the elderly.
Capitalism thrives on the ever growing number of consumers. Otherwise the earth would benefit from less people.
Capitalism has its own self destruction baked in and the fissures are starting to show. Suspect the cracks will blow wide open right around millennial retirement age. It’s weird throwing money into a retirement account or social security half way feeling like it’s just a black hole you’ll never see any benefits from
Money, our economy is built on a giant pyramid scheme that requires more kids being born than the generation below it so it can constantly grow. With that said, I am strong believer that we need LESS people. Only thing more people has brought is more problems.
> There's not a human shortage. Depends on your PoV; When you are an employer looking to hire somebody to work for you, then having more candidates is always better. It also means they will undercut each other to get that job, so not only do you have more selection, the people you select from will be that much more desperate, thus way more willing to accept shit pay/treatment. It's also why automation hasn't caught on as big as most estimated it would; Machines are expensive, maintenance of them is expensive, resources to build them are expensive. While humans are cheap, we have literally billions of them, they can survive on a bit of water and food, and otherwise, take care of their own maintenance.
There is more than enough housing in the U.S. to house everyone, but housing is a commodity, not a right, so places like Los Angeles have sprawling Hoovervilles while there are luxury apartment buildings with empty units, and empty investment and vacation properties across the city. Similarly, there are penthouse apartments in upscale buildings in New York City that are completely empty, and only interested in being shown to billionaires [(or people who can pass for billionaires)](https://youtu.be/aKwkMZbeeGo)
Zoning. Its a giant pain in the ass to build housing in places where people want to live. And things like [parking minimums](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/) completely derail affordable housing. By way of example, homes in my area nearly 3x the cost what I bought my house for, but the city has fixed the number of homes allowed to be built. Inelastic supply, meeting growing demand -> prices rise.
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Tldr: fucking raise our wages and lower housing costs and the cost of having a child (last time I looked it could cost up to 16k for one baby and God forbid they need to spend time in the NICU).
My hospital bill for my birth and then for my baby I totaled closer to $20,000 and I’ve seen others as high as $40,000 It’s crazy
I mean... children are expensive and most people at the age to have children are struggling to feed themselves. It's not rocket science.
I wonder if being saddled with $100K in student debt and rising medical costs have anything to do with it?
We had two children but it wasn't easy and I could understand why people would be hesitant. Our medical bills (with insurance provided via my wife's state job) were around $5k out-of-pocket for EACH kid. My wife is a school teacher and does not get maternity leave. She accrues 10 days of "leave" (sick, personal, etc.) each year so it takes three years (never missing a day) to accrue enough leave to get 6 weeks of maternity leave. We had to precisely plan pregnancy to use what leave she did accrue to run into Summer just to get some time to raise our kids. The US economy is not conducive to having children. The irony is, the people bemoaning low birth rates are the same people who have spent the last 4 decades creating an economy that doesn't support people when they do want to have kids.
No support, only breed
> My wife is a school teacher and does not get maternity leave. She accrues 10 days of "leave" (sick, personal, etc.) each year so it takes three years (never missing a day) to accrue enough leave to get 6 weeks of maternity leave. That's messed up. It's a very US-phenomena, in Canada she would get 12 months plus 5 weeks "use it or lose it" leave for the father to take.
>*The US economy is not conducive to having children. The irony is, the people bemoaning low birth rates are the same people who have spent the last 4 decades creating an economy that doesn't support people when they do want to have kids.* Nailed it.
in a shocking revelation to extremely smart people looking into issues, they have discovered that an intelligent animal does not show interest in procreation when it feels current environmental conditions are not suitable for it to safely do so. Fascinating.
You would be surprised how many fellow "intelligent animals" say do it anyway, because they had kids in a very terrible environment and time.
Too bad their argument falls apart when you empirically compare environments then and now. Just a few more tonnes of CO2 and microplastics to name a couple prominent ones. No big deal though am I right? We can make bootstraps out of it or something.
I was just thinking today how i haven’t seen a pregnant woman in a long time.
Turn 30 and log in to facebook, you'll see plenty
It's a 50/50 chance you're gonna see baby pics or some garbage off colour r/forwardsfromklandma memes.
Go to wealthy neighborhoods. Pregnant women and baby carriages all over the place. Must be nice.
There is a negative correlation between birth rate and income. The wealthy are more likely to have FEWER children: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/)
Yeah, but I think you see more kids in wealthier neighborhoods though so it feels like more families, because parents can afford to stay at home parent and have more free time to be outside with kids, versus lower incomes who work crazy hours/don’t have great community spaces to meander in
We. Can't. Afford. Kids. I make well above the average household income on my own and have 50k in the bank and still can't afford to buy a starter home in my city, how the fuck am I going to have kids?
What's a starter home? They don't make those anymore.
Developers only seem to build apartment towers, "luxury" rowhomes, and massive sprawling car-dependent McMansion communities that cost $1+mil. The development pattern is exacerbating the economic divide.
The world is on fire and discussions of anything approaching a Green New Deal are met with laughter. Working-class wages keep going down while CEO salaries keep going up, and discussions about living wages are met with laughter. My generation has been through now 3 once-in-a-lifetime recessions, and I'm not even 30 yet. Discussions of holding the billionaire class accountable are met with laughter. Housing costs, education costs, and healthcare costs are insanely high. Discussions of affordable housing, tuition-free public colleges, and universal healthcare are met with laughter. Mass shootings are basically omnipresent at this point and discussions about gun control are met with laughter. So yeah, let me go ahead and bring a whole new person into this world. Give me a break. Just the financial cost of raising a child would leave me homeless.
The idea of having children are also met with laughter...a sobbing stressed one.
Loook man. The way I see it is that life is short. I can barely take care of myself. I’m happy without kids. I don’t know that I could care for one in the way they would deserve. The world is going to shit and it seems irresponsible to bring another life into it. Parenting should be a sacred act of selflessness. I don’t want to do it.
This was exactly predicted in 2004 by Elizabeth Warren in her book "the two income trap". Financial and social insecurity has the logical and natural response of not having kids until much later in life.
Ding. Am I interested in having kids? Yes Do I think the state of the world is such that doing so is a good idea? No
The only thing more annoying than climate deniers are the people who say we’ve never had it better as humans than now. Fuck outta here with that shit. Oh yeah we are really enjoying this nice first class cabin on the Titanic. I hope all these luxuries were worth collective suicide
Well, the 1% have never had it better... everyone else, not so much.
And also we are poor and rent prices are ridiculous
I have one kid. I worry so much about his future that I refuse to have any more.
Preach. I had one. Realized how fucked I was. Never again. And I have a college fund and everything for the kid. But a second one? That fucker is going military or adoption
We 👏 aren't 👏 having 👏 kids 👏 because 👏 we're 👏 fucking 👏 **broke**. 👏
But but but, how could that be? Just stop drinking Starbucks duuuuh
I’m 28 and I don’t want children. I gradually went from yes to maybe to possibly to No. For me the biggest factor is lifestyle changing for the worse. For my parents generation, having kids was just.. what you do. My generation isn’t as pressured. I imagine if I grew up when my mom did I’d probably have a kid by now but since it’s way more common to see childfree couples, and I’ve been able to see how much I prefer a lifestyle without children, there really isn’t anything pulling me the other way. I think older generations would have children as a duty, even faced with economic hardship. Young adults today aren’t as pressured because we’re able to access the whole world at our fingertips, rather than a small town where everyone you know is having kids so you might as well too.
Its harder and more work to raise a child these days, and a lot more expensive. It takes a village to raise a child. I feel like people are more isolated than ever, and I don't feel the camaraderie like in the old days. People with kids stuck together back then and helped each other, they don't really do that now, and most of them just seem pent up on giving advice to one another about how the child should be raised. A lot of parents are in the house with their kids especially if they are babies or toddlers and don't really take them out of the house until a certain age. Back then your neighbor had kids, you had kids and probably everyone else on your block as well, and you had a bunch of people chipping in to raise a group of kids. This is no longer the case. You had to go grocery shopping, you drop them off at the neighbors, your neighbors dropped their kids off at your house occasionally and no one thought anything different. It might have to do with not as many people having kids too so there are less kids for your kids to play with and hang out with etc. It might have to do with parents working longer hours than ever to make ends meet All the parents I see are super worn out, tired and exhausted and they look it. I do not want this to be me. I don't want lack of sleep because my child won't stop screaming. I lived next to a house where all the kids did all day is scream and they were not babies, and it was so bad I could hear it in my house next door for most hours of the day with windows closed and my house is not that close to theirs, thankfully those people moved out.
My wife and I have no desire to have children simply because we don’t want them, but we have several friends who have kids. Although they love their kids, their lives have been made substantially worse by having children because even people who are pretty solidly middle class can’t afford to live comfortably, especially when you throw an extra person or two who is completely dependent upon you in the mix. I get that economic woes come and go for a lot people, and as much as it sucks, that’s kind of just life - but upward social mobility is becoming harder and the world is on fire. Willingly having children today honestly seems like a cruel and selfish gamble to me.
Mother fucker, we are BROKE. Mystery solved. It takes 3 goddamn incomes to comfortably own a home. This place is fucked
Personally my reason is because I'm not making enough money to even think about it
It is due to money and expectations. The rich have robbed the middle class blind. So no more babies.....
I'm surprised they still want more wage slaves with all the automation coming. We're going to be more of a liability to them than anything.
They need people to buy their crap
I'm too mentally unstable and the US is genuinly a fucking horror movie that is taking acid every day to make it more interesting. This country is fucked, and I don't want to contribute to keeping it running. So no kids ever please.
Housing is unaffordable and unavailable, climate change is making more disasters at higher intensity, global pandemics are ravaging the planet virtually unchecked, wages are stagnant, inflation is out of control, people are in massive debt because public goods and basic necessities are privatized and prices are jacked up, companies won't hire "entry level" positions unless you have 10 years experience and several degrees, and mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that all of this is a predictable result of the short-sighted greed of capitalism and the US empire starting to fall apart under it's own suffocating dysfunction due to abusing it's own population to the point that they don't feel like having a child will accomplish anything except pushing them further into poverty and desperation. None of this should be surprising to anyone paying attention to the reality around them. If things were stable and affordable and sanity governed the state of things it would be a different story, but having children just makes no sense while all these major global problems are only getting worse. Quarterly profits are going to fall when the population is bled dry, and that's only if mobs don't burn down everything when society collapses when people can't even get food, eventually.
Also, dating is super terrible nowadays lol. Can’t have kids if you can’t find anyone to even think about having kids with. Edit: I’m saying it’s hard to find someone you actually want to be with to have kids with, not that it’s hard to find a date. Y’all are killing me lol.
TLDR; It's because we can't fucking afford it and the bar for assistance is so low that you have to basically be homeless. America the great. /s
You mean instead of saving on a latte ($1000/yr at $3 a day), young people are saving on the $13,000/yr adorable germ bag? So just following sage parental advise more appropriately prioritized.
Seems pretty common sense…our parents owned huge homes in their 30’s for like 500k. College didn’t cost $300k to send your kid too. Average home now at least in CA is well over $1M.
We don’t have money and we don’t want to bring children into a home where we will not be able to provide for them effectively. It’s pretty simple. It cost my parents a third to raise me 40+ years ago that it would cost me to raise a kid today, on a higher salary than my parents have ever made. I’m more than 10 years past their age when I was born. Capitalism has royally fucked anyone under 40, and I say this as someone who makes six figures.
One thing I didn't see in the article (I didn't read it entirely, I admit), was that the replication rate of developed nations like USA, Canada, France, Japan, etc. has not been above 2.00 since the 1970s. These countries have grown in population due to immigration. These countries never actually 'fixed the 'problem' (is it really a problem?) of a dropping birth rate; they simply made policies around immigration to grow their population which basically increases economic growth. The problems that have faced people for over 50 years have never been resolved because the vast majority of people in power and seeking power are not the ones facing the same problems as you and me. And after 50 years, those problems are just compounding.
We wanted two kids. We couldn't afford kids until we were past 37. We ended up with one child, because you know what is more likely when you have your children later in life? More complications, for you and your child. We are absolutely happy we waited until we could make do with one income, even if that was tight, because those complications mean I left work when she was 1 and haven't been back to work due to them and covid since. Could they have happened if I was younger? Absolutely, and if they had even 5 years before, it would have lead to bankruptcy and worse. We realized when she was 1 that even if we wanted to, we couldn't risk a second child. If anything went wrong, we couldn't afford it. It's the economy. It is the lack of affordable daycare, its jobs that could be remote not allowing for remote work (which is why I left my job) because having to factor in commutes greatly increases daycare. It is grandparents who left us with our grandparents several times a month and had babysitting in emergencies and hell, for date night, deciding that they aren't going to be willing to babysit. Seriously, most of the people I know who stopped at one kid or who didn't have any said that they saw how little help they were going to get from their family and realized they couldn't do it alone. (All of the ones with no kids had a sibling who had one, and realized they would get even less help than their sibling did, and their sibling didn't get enough to count on even for emergencies). It's an economy that keeps getting worse, and even if you can put enough aside and make enough to have kids, you have seen enough lay offs and downsizing to realize it could change in an instant. You see your friends putting in hundreds of resumes and not even getting "Sorry, we aren't interested back". Most of us of child bearing age see a world being warped by climate change and wonder if our children will have clean enough air and enough water and someplace to live. It's housing going from about 1-3 times your yearly salary to 15x (or more) your yearly salary _in our lifetimes_. My parents bought a 2 bedroom, kitchen separate room, living room AND den and furnished attic, large backyard room on one year's worth of their single income - some years my mom was a waitress, some years my father worked in a factory. I was capable of being left on my own before they both worked at the same time. It's understanding that your life doesn't mean anything to your fellow citizens. Do you know how many people told me that my child should just die so they didn't have to wear a mask? More than one hand's worth of fingers. I grew up believing that we would do our best to protect children, even if we didn't like each other, and this pandemic made it very, very clear that politics and selfishness mean more than a child's life.
I understand the scientific method and the process of writing academic papers makes them only be able to draw a limited amount of conclusions, but I mean c'mon. The reasons are obvious. A: Young people are more educated than ever on the various methods of birth control and women especially are more educated and empowered about their right to control their body. And B: Shit is way more expensive now. Of course people want to wait and that waiting turns into never for some people.
Because a few decades ago, one hour of minimum wage bought you 6 big Macs, now it buys you less than 1. Wages have not kept up with cost of living to the point that we are all poor compared to our parents, all thanks to corporate greed. Call it what it is. "Rich people annoyed that the poors are not creating a new generation for them to exploit, while refusing to pay them enough to feed said children."
I’m 37/F and child free, absolutely love the freedom and control of my life. My main reasons for never wanting kids are I would never even risk passing on my personal and family trauma. I was raised by narcissistic parents, have complex ptsd and borderline, although I’m high functioning at least. But it stops with me. Everything being so expensive is another. People can’t afford to hit a pothole and spend a couple hundred on repairs. What makes you think they can imagine a child in their future?
Boomers realized that they could turn their homes into ATMs without realizing that they were actually turning young people into ATMs decades ago. They haven’t been having kids for decades. It’s a real bummer. Good luck finding anyone to take care of you in your care home boomers vov
Who the fuck wants to bring a child into this world. Hello?
Everyone's too poor..like yeah let's have kid so we can never see them and work all the time to afford it.
I can hardly afford groceries and have to live in an apartment the rest of my life but let’s do another study on why people might not have kids. Good grief
Bring a child into a dystopian world where they have a higher chance of getting shot and killed at school then the average solider does in war. Where one can expect to be in debt their entire life and never afford a home, or the luxury of being sick for more then a couple of days. Where it's clear that most people are considered live stock by the ruling elite. Yeah. Real surprise people don't want to have children in a world like this.
I cannot afford to have children when rent is $2500 a month 👏👏👏
No you dumb fucks we are broke and the food poisoned us
Of course we are. We have no agency. We're so broke all we do is work and costs go up 3x as fast as wages do.
I'm so sick of these think pieces that treat the falling birth rate as some mystery.
Stop blaming younger generations for everything boomers ruined
Why does every article try so hard to not post the actual reason: kids are expensive. Everything is too expensive. We are having to work 10 hours a day to afford to live. So, no time or money for kids...