You can only raise kids properly if you can afford it.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but poor people never being able to have children would certainly be… Problematic. My forefathers were by no means well off, but having children was (and in many countries still is) seen as way to ensure your own health and safety as you grow older. Sadly, our society is no longer designed for families to thrive. Instead we work for others so we can pay people to look after our loved ones. It’s pretty fucked up when you think about it.
I, too, think all people should be able to raise kids. That society makes it practically impossible is the problem.
You might call me old-fashioned, but being able to have one person at home to care for the kids and actually raise them is something that I consider a cornerstone.
Why put kids in the world, just to have to provide for them and have other people raise them, because you cannot afford to do this yourself?
japan and SOUTH korea have this insane work culture, that your lives or to live at your job, and must be drinking with t he bosses after. also heavily ostracized if you arnt making it in those countries. SK is apparently at a worst position than JAPAN birthwise goes.
china is currently have thier own crisis, thier 1-child policy has a created a deficiency of women , thats why they have become so obsessed of tracking womens lives, plus trying to "encourage sex. they also overproduce stem graduates with no job markets going around too. all this associated with HCOL as well.
plus the poor job markets for stem majors, even with tech laying off you can still find a job somewhere. but other stem have alot more requirements to enter the field. biotech, bio, Psyche if you think you can get away by not getting a PsyD or phd.
women getting education is a major factor of having less or no children, thats why there has been significant initiative in many universitis to help woman get experience in stem, like bio degrees. this does has unintentional effect of leaving men behind in bio specifically.
The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they’ll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then
This, 1000%. Every study I’ve looked at states the current economy makes having children more of a drain than a gain.
Over here in Spain it’s because of lack of funding. Theres little to no support for child care, if you have a kid here your either working tooth to the bone or off well and even still you only have 1 kid because 2 is too expensive.
I can’t prove it but I suspect that they are having about as many children as they want and our expectations of ‘fertility rates’ are actually skewed by the number of unwanted pregnancies that were forced on people who then existed in the space of ‘We didn’t ask for this but now we love the little shit so I guess we’ll make the best of it.’ The world is and has been changing so fast for the last century or so that our sense of long term trends is much harder to understand.
Only get pregnant if you can afford it.
OK
No, not like that
Other activities outcompete children.
The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they’d rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.
That’s for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don’t scale as well as they used to.
capitalism
Late stage capitalism.
Having kids is really expensive and insane amount of responsibility. Childcare is a full time job - so you need to go one worker per family, or be able to afford paying for it.And it also becomes recursive I think.
People want to be good parents. But in late stage capitalism, that means setting your children up to succeed in that environment. If people struggle to set themselves up as parents, they can’t have faith that they’ll be able to set their children up such that there’s just no point. Especially if you start thinking about the future and whether your grandkids could even be ok.
As someone living in the USA going into my late 30s still without kids, you nailed it. We’ve been married for 10 years. In a different world, we might have had a kid at some point in the last 5, but between covid and climate change and the second Trump term and the general sense that everything is about to implode, it doesn’t really make us feel inspired to try.
To be clear, at the moment we have everything we would need to be parents if we wanted to. But the prospect of subjecting a kid to young adulthood in the 2040s seems brutal. We’re what I would consider “nudge-able” into having a kid or two, but the world keeps giving us nothing but nudges in the direction of choosing to be childfree for life.
Random example from this year: we keep getting barraged with news slop about how our jobs are about to all be replaced by LLMs or the economy is about to collapse under the weight of the LLM bubble. Not particularly reassuring. I realize there’s no perfect time to have kids and tons of people make it work, but as a couple who have always been in the “maybe” camp, inaction feels like the only thing a logical person would choose, year after year after year.
We don’t have many years left where it’s actually viable, and frankly I can’t imagine it’s going to change.
This is what happened to my wife and me. We kept waiting and delaying because shit sucked and now… we can’t. Nature made the decision for us, much to the dismay of my parents but to the joy of my bank account.
I’m sorry, but every human being from every generation has suffered from fear for their children. The future is always unknown. There’s always been a looming future doom. The future of the climate is unprecedented, but so was the advent of the nuclear bomb. So was the advent of the trebuchet. So was the advent of steel.
The only certainty about the future is uncertainty. While absolutely terrifying, my view on it was even though it’s scary, I’ll give it a shot.
I do fear for my children’s future, but so has every human who ever had children. I enjoy the here and now and carry the hope that masses truly care for each other and always will.
Historically that hope doesn’t bear out but good for you, if not for your children.
You’re here. Is that not enough hope?
No, that’s fuckin dumb.
That’s a good point, I guess.
Why are you so upset all of a sudden? Are you ok?
Adding to that thought, you used to also have grandparents and elder family members who had the time and inclination to help out. This was especially true for those of us who were born to boomers. But now those people of that same age are having to work as things like greeters at Walmart just to be able to pay their own bills. So they don’t have the leisure time anymore to assist with raising grandchildren.
Or they just dont care and have conpletely different values. My parents arent even half the grandparents that their parents were.
We are living through the collapse of capitalism. Countries will fall I to 1 of 2 categories in response.
- Socialist
- Fascist
Given most countries are lead by the hyper rich, expect to see most being forcibly directed to #2
Countries can’t have children, they’re not alive.
Thebes begs to differ.
For being alive or bearing children?
Bearing children. The founder, Cadmus, killed a dragon and buried the teeth in the ground and from that were “born” the Spartoi, fully grown and armed. They fought until only the strongest remained who then sired the noble houses of Thebes.
My take is “How can I afford to have a kid when I can’t even take care of myself?”.
Have you seen how the world is doing?
Here are my reasons:
- We are already starting to feel the effects of global warming, it will only get worse and people don’t take it serious. Why should Ibput another soul into this world just to suffer from the stupidity of others?
- Child care is super expensive and quality isn’t great and being a stay at home parent isn’t really an option if you want too keep up in the work market place.
- Why should I have a kid, if I’m not gonna spend time with them? I mean to feed them & offer them all the anemities, me and my partner would need to work full-time, so when are we gonna spend time with our kid?
- edit see bellow why.
- I like my freedoms.
- The schooling system is shit. Why should I raise kids in a society that starts the “grind” at age 5 and keeps you going until you are 65?
- etc.
we all dream of having […] neurotypical, cis kids, but it’s a high possibility of that not being the case.
Is that a personal gripe of yours of there being more recognition for more neurodivergent and transgender recognition?
Oohhhhh shit, I worded that one horribly… my add brain fucked it up and it came out so worng… I first wanted We all dream of having healthy kids but what if they are not (thinking of cancers or other medical diseases) and than a second bullet point as in, what if your kid is not neurotypical or non cis (queer) are you able to deal with everything that comes with? (Thinking of how bad society has turned against them in the past few years with the rise of the far right and how dificult it is tobstand up for peoples rights).
I truly have nothing against neurospicy and queer people. I know the way I worded it was terrible, and should I have offended anyone, I’m terribly sorry. Also thank you for pointing it out!.
Ok cool, I wasn’t sure so I figured I’d ask rather than accuse
We’re like pandas in captivity. We’ll fuck if the conditions are right. They haven’t been right in a loooooong time. A little bit of enrichment in our enclosures would help tremendously.
Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.
People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.
Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?
Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.
I know 30-somethings that live with their parents because they cannot afford their own house and there are no decent rental houses available either.
