Ask Lemmy

Countries are just arbitrary pieces of land and cannot produce offspring. 😌

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.

Nowadays, it's expected and often necessary for both people in a relationship to work full-time and have a career if they want to maintain a decent living standard. No time or money for having kids.

Only get pregnant if you can afford it.

OK

No, not like that

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

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

Economic.

Where it takes a young couple 80 hours of paid labor per week just to maintain a lower-middle class lifestyle, kids become an unaffordable luxury in a traditional family. When 40 hours of paid labor can comfortably support a family, that couple starts having kids.

UBI corrects the problem in multiple ways. It meets the basic needs of the family, so that their own income is immediately gainful.

UBI removes "starvation" as a motivation for labor. A drowning man will drag his wife, kids, and even his rescuers underwater with him, just for one more breath of air in his lungs. The desperate laborer will accept whatever pittance he is offered for his time, because that pittance is better than foregoing medical coverage, or the roof over his head, or enough food. In accepting that pittance, this desperate worker establishes the market value of labor, and drags down the compensation of everyone around him. A UBI relieves the majority of his desperation, and frees him to walk away from exploitative employers. That skinflint employer is forced to either offer a reasonable wage, or go out of business.

A UBI is a "Citizenship Dividend" - a payment for the use of Democratically-derived political powers. It is payment for the individual's (compulsory) investment in his or her government, allowing that government to provide services to and collect taxes and fees from non-person, corporate entities on our behalf.

Late stage capitalism.

When it is already hard to save up and buy a house before it's too late for you and your partner to be capable of conceiving, is it any surprise?

I know plenty of people who would have a kid but don't because they simply can't afford to

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.

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

It will differ by country but I've seen some poll from Poland recently:

For those few that don't speak polish:

1. I don't need kids (37%)
2. I can't afford it (20%)
3. I'm worried about wars and instability (14%)
4. Poorly working healthcare system (13%)
5. I don't have the right partner
6. I'm worried about unemployment
7. Not enough support form the government
8. Being a parent is too hard
9. I'm worried about climate change
10. Other (20%)
11. I don't know (14%)

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.

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.

Too expensive and career suicide.

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.

As the average income of a country goes up, birthrate goes down. That's just how humans are. We guess at reasons, but it's just a universally observable fact.

All high income industrialized nations developed low birthrates. North america, europe, japan, korea and now china.

If rich nations allow room for anyone else to claw their way up out of the low end of the value chain, we'll see the same thing happen there.

Opportunity to do something else with your life. Kids are unaffordable. World is going to shit.

Feminism/Equality and the changes it has brought.

This isn't a bad thing, which is important to get out early because some far-right groups use it as an example for why we should wind back the clock.

Most women in advanced countries work, they have and want to have meaningful careers. Having children conflicts with that, in the immediate significant time off, and the long term impact of being the default parent when they have issues at school or are sick.

Lifestyles in advanced countries really rely on two incomes. Stopping work for a significant period to raise multiple children is a significant impact on that income, plus the long term expenses of the child combine to reduce that lifestyle. Not having children, or reducing the number, can be an economic choice.

The culture of both parents working also impacts the support network. Your working, your friends are working, the village is behind a desk not supporting you.

Finally women get a choice now, which is a change that is recent, isn't global and doesn't seem to be as widely acknowledged as it should be.

Society needs to change to address these issues and provide these missing supports. Which is going to take time, but as they are addressed we will probably see the birth rates start to climb again.

capitalism

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Here's the thing: lower birth rates are actually a sign of a more developed country. There are a number of reasons for this. If you can't be sure if the system will properly take care of you in your late years, people tend to have more children so that there will be someone to take care of them in old age. If people (especially women) are better educated, there will be more of a focus on persuing careers, and children can be an impediment to that. Also, if people have better access to healthcare and birth control, many will use it. Just a couple of examples.

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

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

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

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

The fragmentation of multigenerational households. Without that support network, raising children is much harder and more expensive and much, much more daunting.

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

I really, really dislike children

I have an amazing life, and the way I live is completely incompatible with kids, even if I wanted them

More people are realising that it's not compulsory to breed, and that they can have vastly better lives without children

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

I know what you mean, but your queetion is incorrectly phrased

My personal reason is impossibly stressful, abusing, stealing and raping legal system and the society we face.

Otherwise I would have 10 kids

As quality of life rises there are more things competing for peoples interest as well as the cost of large raising a child being very high. Like if you're 25 and making money do you want to fly around the world creating experiences and having fun in the short term or do you want to save up your money to spend it all on your kids.

To increase births the recurring living costs need to go down, we need housing to ~20% rents or house prices. Maybe groceries down 10% and we're probably see an increase. Public daycare's becoming more common as well because that costs an arm and a leg.

Also im reason only leaving out working time because its not bad here averaging 37 hours per week with lots of holidays and paid maturinty leave and your job must be held open for you to return to.

Isn't it obvious?

They don’t want to.