this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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18-20 is the typical age for the most healthy children, and lowest maternal problems. At the same time, economic health doesn't peak until well into the 40s.
It makes for a social tug of war thats never easy to handle.
This was reported as misinformation, so I'm going to take this opportunity to set it straight:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/best-age-to-get-pregnant
When society and biology don't align, we get a birthrate crisis.
Who could've ever predicted making it very hard financially to be young person and making it practically impossible to buy a house and start a family would mean people stop having families /s
My parents had children they couldn't actually afford, so they spent most of their time at work instead of raising us. Somehow, they expect me to be grateful to them for not being there and for bringing me into slave world.
I wish I hadn't been born.
Same, but I went another way with it. I decided to have kids and be a better parent than them. Since my brother didn't have kids I was able to break the cycle and put better people into the world than my parents did.
If we don't try to put better and smart people out there then we are destined to fulfill Mike Judges prophecy.
I love kids, being a parent was the only "dream" I was really sure of when I was younger. But I can barely afford to support myself, and as a woman in my upper-30s I can see the door of opportunity closing rapidly.
Thankfully, not all is lost. Working in education means I get to do my part to "put better and smart people out there" without having my own kids. It still hurts that I can't have the life I wanted, but at least I can still positively influence future generations.
This is the reality for most people. I'm sorry they couldn't spend more time with you.
I mean I agree that we don't need to keep growing our population. What I'm referring to is the many people my age (Gen z) who cannot, and likely will not be able to raise families ever despite wanting to.
The rate of the demographic collapse in places like South Korea is also guaranteed to cause significant social issues, like too many old people, not enough people to take care of them sort of social issues.
Careful, someone might call you an ecofascist for acknowledging that obvious reality...
Smart people stop having kids, let's make a movie about it!
(I know IQ isn't only genetic ofc.)
The birthrate "crisis" is also in large part due women's access to contraception and control over when they have children and how many.
Even in Nordic gay space communist countries where all the needs of mothers are provided by the state, there is a birth rate crisis (met with immigration).
I think many of us uncomfortable with the dawning reality that achieving the replacement rate of humanity requires oppression of women. Bearing children is an enormous pain in the ass and without pressuring and grooming women into it, we don't get to the maintenance target of 2.1 babies per woman.
There are probably ways societies could THEORETICALLY adjust to make child-bearing more emotionally attractive without social coercion, but, fuck, man, society can't even maintain platonic friendships these days, how are we going to figure out how to have every woman average 2.1 babies?
People need to give up on the idea that the replacement rate needs to be met all the time, everywhere.
It is ok, and natural for populations to decrease intermittently.
We have too many people. We can’t find affordable homes for the people we do have. We can’t meet the energy demands of the people today, without borrowing from the well-being of our planet’s future.
People are correctly looking around at the world and deciding they don’t need to be bringing more people into this world as it currently stands.
Our system is simply not set up for declining populations.
I'd like to think the declining birth rates are a natural correction, and that with fewer people, real estate will come down, and tuitition will drop, etc., but I think the problem isn't scare resources, it's wealth inequality.
And if we decided to move back into liveable cities, we'd have plenty of resources.
Our system is not set up for anything other than to make the richest people richer, by exploiting the labour of the rest of the people.
Our real system, the closed system known as planet Earth is not set up for endless growth of a human economy. All populations go through growth and crash cycles. The longer we push off the decline, the harder the crash will be.
Taking away abortion rights and forcing women out of education and careers to stay home.
Well, that's how they're trying to do it in the US right now.
Yup. That's exactly the play.
I was hoping for a more liberal-minded solution, but it probably requires radically smaller communal living, more intergenerational. Even if everything's paid for, having two kids is a real sacrifice, but triply so if you're living alone and your grandparents are dead and your parents live an hour away.
Also check out Britt Hartley's video on Christian men. Religion is traditionally the place for women to have babies and be communal and shit but Christianity is so besotted with female oppression that the light is turning on in the minds of Christian women: Christian men are NOT safe partners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTCMbGBnDh8
And you're absolutely right. The terrifying thing is that toopush women into having babies again--at least by force--you have to strip away 100 years of rights and close every avenue and loophole out to an independent life and an independent mind. Just banning abortion is not enough. You have to close schools, forbid employment, close loans, etc.
Women, especially you majority-Trump-voting white women: take note.
It gets really frustrating seeing the conversations around falling birthrates. Everyone only wants to talk about the economy and social safety nets while ignoring the real driving cause - women's rights.
This is a manufactured crisis in order to control women.
Yeah, a society that doesn't take into account biology can't possibly last. The hard discussion is that a lot of it is because we, as a modern society, expect certain things now: access to contraception is good, women having equal ability to enter college and employment is good.
But it's unavoidable that when an increasingly large share of the population are getting established in their careers in their late 20s or early 30s, the window of time to date, marry, and start a family is so much shorter than it used to be. Add in increased housing and living costs, and the window gets even smaller. Also, heaven forbid any step in the process takes longer than planned...
It is also important to take it into account in a positive way. In the 'past' women were disqualified for certain jobs because they might get pregnant and that would require giving them leave and that would cost the capitalist machine profits!
Sometimes I wonder if women's lib was only successful because it happened to align with the capitalist desire to double the labor pool. Is that too cynical? Maybe we still would've gotten there otherwise.
It's irritating that you used to be able to run a 2.4 children household on a male breadwinner, and now two incomes is often not enough. We've normalised everyone working and noone able to focus on home and the family.
I guess the idea of the "stay at home dad" didn't take off enough to normalise a single worker after women were able to leave the house.
(I'm aware of the broad strokes hetronormative language here, but it's relevant)
Pregnancies in teenagers carry additional risk. The healthiest age range for women to be birthing babies is a little higher than 18-20. More like 20-30.
Yeah, I’m not sure why this person has so many upvotes while being so easily demonstrably wrong.
I’ve always heard more like 25-35 too.
My understanding was that the best time for women to have children was between 20-30 years old, not 18-20.
From what I've read, 20-30 is when women have most of their eggs at the best quality, and have the lowest health risk in pregnancy.
Where does the 18-20 come from? Like I guess you're most fertile at 20 but that's the only metric I can see thats best at 20. Hell, a lot of sources even say you have the best chance of natural conception in your late 20s.
It comes from men being attracted to teenagers and wanting to justify the attraction.
Ugh that's so fucking gross and literally not factual.
Any man interested in teens is 100% predatory and no amount of pseudoscience is gonna make up for the fact that
A) teens' bodies are not equipped to carry a baby without complications
B) teens are not mentally equipped to be parents
C) they only like teens because they're predators and teens are the only ones naive enough to fall for their shitty manipulation tactics.
It would be cool if we changed society just a little to help with this.
Not so much that it affects the rich though. That would be asking too much.
I mean, sure, we could make the world a better place, but like six very rich guys would be sad so we can't.
if woman didn’t date me for financial security they wouldn’t date me at all!
I meant more in the sense that we could tax the very rich and give everyone housing but Elon Musk wouldn't be a trillionaire anymore so we can't do that.
18-20 is not the "typical age for healthy children", it's in the oldest part of not being that and very youngest part of it. No one that young should have children anyway. Your, objectively wrong, view of this borders on very creepy.
Mhm, pushing that teenagers have the healthiest children and lowest maternal problems helps foster beliefs like this- that men significantly older than teenagers are not sexist or predatory for impregnating them. This is a comment from this very conversation thread.
[off topic]
Old science fiction novel. "Podkayne of Mars" by Robert Heinlein.
In the future Martian colonial women are encouraged to get married young and have a bunch of kids. The children are placed in cryogenic stasis until the parents can afford to raise them.
Heinlein always had a knack of finding core societal issues as well as the most deranged solutions to them.
Too young mentally as well. Which could be from society, but even in times where people were forced to be an adult early (working and having children), they did it from necessity and not because they were ready.
I have a cousin who had a baby at 14, back in like 2005.
Her life, uh, didnt turn out well.