I wouldn't even put it on poverty, because large population booms have happened under impoverished conditions elsewhere without issue.

But there's a huge social taboo against pregnancy at virtually any age. Children are treated like luxuries. They're enormously expensive to have and to raise, and everything about childhood is commodified to shit. Add to that how people are all terrified of one another. Men are told to put their prospective spouses on a pedestal, so they've all got to be supermodels with PhDs and rich parents. Women are inundated with the grossest men imaginable in dating markets that reward you for being an annoying creep. Everyone is told to hate one another constantly by a media apparatus that profits off your alienation.

We also seem to absolutely hate kids, in this modern moment. They're constantly presented as violent, parasitic, gross, vulgar monsters.

So much of this is just mass media bombarding us with bad advice and bigoted worldviews. How is anyone supposed to procreate under these conditions?

Ngl I think it’s selfish and cruel to the child to have a child in the current world. Why the fuck would I have a kid as I’m facing down a planet that may not be inhabitable in 10-20 years, in a dying empire that limps closer to collapse every day. Where they’ll grow up in fear of getting shot or permanently disabled by covid just to go to school.

And that’s if I could afford to take care of kids in the first place, when I can barely afford to give myself a decent standard of living.

In order to convince me to have a child I’d need the following: Free child care, free healthcare, triple my current wage, a house in a walkable area because kids can’t drive and thus shouldn’t be in car dominated areas, gun control, a better education system, and Climate Stalin.

Feels like "Most people are poor as shit" is a pretty good indicator. No need to write a whole article about it.

Fewer people are pairing off as couples, too. Nobody has time for a social life when they're juggling multiple jobs, there's no Third Places, all the social media and dating apps suck, people are more alienated from one another than ever, and to top it off absolutely everything is getting ridiculously expensive. If people don't have a person to fuck and a place to fuck and the energy to fuck they're not gonna fuck, and that's step one of having kids.

I have a better answer:

I have a theory that millennials are the first generation to realize how their own parents fucked them up. Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do. Now they do the opposite.

It's true I am afraid that I would fail to provide my children with an acceptable standard of living on a dying planet thanks mom and dad.

I'm coming to the realization that I would have kids if I could give them a good life. But I can't, and my household is like, actually upper middle class. It is obscene that with how much money we make we can't even use that money to have a kid and give them a good life.

It’s because they killed the middle class. We can’t afford children. The single most effective way I can kill the ruling class is to not give them a future worker to consume. Get fucked billionaires!!

I think that my SO and I would make fantastic parents and we almost certainly have the support system and financial means to have kids. My hang up is, what do you tell your kids in 20 years when living conditions are much worse than they are now and they realize that you must have known the trajectory society was on when you made the decision to have them? How do you explain your choice to bring a new human into a world full of increasing suffering and injustice?

Having one child is so expensive. I often look at families having 2+ and always wonder WTF they do to make it work. The answer is always more money and parents/extended family that they can rely on.

For now I just have to hope I don't have many expensive things happen until my kid can enroll in Kindergarten.

I told my extended family that they'd get a grandkid if Bernie won in 2016 or 2020. They made their choice, so did I.

They know, they're just choosing to be coy. Someone's gotta maintain the transparent veneer of normalcy and decorum in this hellhole.

Okay I've had a think on it and my serious answer is this: We can argue that the world has always been full of exploitation and suffering and pain and that there have been dark times when it seemed like the eschaton was truly at hand (there were people who saw the black plague and still had kids). There's two explanations for why:

1. People still wanted to fuck despite birth control being unreliable or unavailable.
2. Kids were an economic necessity - you needed the extra hands to make a farm productive, and the social expectation was that your kids would take care of you when you were old. It was a standard part of the retirement plan.

Re: 1: Now we have free porn and consequence free sex
Re: 2: Now we have 401k's and - pfft, who am I kidding, no millennial thinks they're going to be able to retire and the atomization of society means we're currently relegating our own parents to nursing homes and who wants that? If I'm still alive when I'm 80 I'm going to wander out in the woods and take mind-dissolving quantities of hallucinogens until I get to go face-to-whatever with the eternal Dao and ask it what the hell it was thinking.

tl;dr - having kids used to be unavoidable or necessary for your own survival, and now they're not

The imperial core continues to lose its grasp on the planet so we in said imperial core unilaterally decided that future generations are a waste of time.

yeah uh performance anxiety. couldn't be that the modern life is filled with shit and people are choosing not to force someone else to live here and people who barely have enough to support themselves deciding they can't afford the responsibility/burden

i don't want to take care of a cat wtf do i want a kid for?

i'm not having kids because i don't want kids. hope this helps

Mine wasn't planned but we're trying as hard as possible to break the cycles of trauma we inherited from our families.

Also we're insanely privileged to have helpful family. We'd have been fucked a couple times already without a helping hang

The schools here suck and I can't afford residence in the good school district.

I mean I'm infertile now so

But more seriously I have a masters degree and I'm still barely keeping my head above water. Like I legit don't think I could even take care of a pet rn