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Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.
When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.
Further reasons included…not having found the right partner.
I think this reason doesn’t get enough attention. I am childless, and there are a lot of complex reasons why that is, but I think I would have been much more likely to try to have kids if I had been able to find a woman I really wanted to have kids with. Of all the women I’ve been with, only one was someone I would want to have kids with, but she couldn’t have kids.
I have two kids. 7 and 3. Parenting is the hardest thing you will ever do.
I’m not unaccomplished, by any means, but I genuinely felt like I wasted my life before having a kid. We had our first at 36 and we’re about to start trying for a 2nd at 38.
Which is to say, while it’s hard, it’s one of the only things worth doing in life. IMO, obviously.
(For the record, in our 20s we were the “no thanks” crowd, I changed in my 30s and my wife took an extra 6 years to come around)
Edit: lol love the downvotes for this benign comment. Lemmy is a dumpsterfire.
I’m gay and married. No kids, don’t want them. I have nieces and nephews I can borrow for the day and then give them back.
Cool man. Not even close to the same thing.
That’s what he’s saying.
that in itself is a service to your family.
I decided at 30 to have kids. I wouldn’t say I wasted my life before kids, I just wasn’t ready yet. I still feel under prepared. I say that children is the hardest thing you will ever do, and I think that’s the source of downvotes I’m getting. I’m not saying that there are not other things in life that are hard. If you choose not to have kids, you can still have hard things in your life.
However, if you do choose to have kids, that will be the hardest thing you do. Emotionally and physically hard. You lose any sort of regenerative sleep for 5 years. Fitness routine? Bye bye. Energy? Out the window. Oh, you enjoyed the relationship with your spouse? HAH! And then you take the emotional stuff into it, like mourning the loss of the human baby you grew to love and falling in love with the toddler the baby became. And then the cycle repeats again and again until one day they don’t come back. It’s a 20 year relationship that ends with a partial breakup.
You lose any sort of regenerative sleep for 5 years. Fitness routine? Bye bye. Energy? Out the window.
Oh shit, do I have kids?
You might want to ask your doctor.
My kids are similar ages and I think non-parents assume we are insulting them we we state how difficult parenting is. It’s an objective fact that having kids is hard, they make every activity at least twice as difficult.
For example. I had to travel for work recently. 12 hours of travelling total, including 4 hours in traffic. Because the kids weren’t there, it was really easy.
Another example. My MS in engineering feels like it was nothing compared to the work I’ve put in for the almost 8 years our first has been alive.
Which seems like I’m making fun of people without kids for thinking normal life is easy. Nope, my perception is warped and everyone has their own perception of life’s difficulties.
To raise a child with the correct moral characteristic takes time and input from many people. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is spot on.
Yeah and some of us are so far from families or even worst have unreliable off the rails families. Without proper support it will be a disaster.
Nobody can afford kids with all of the corporate price gouging and wage theft. no shit we’re not having more kids.
I think previous generations felt they had no choice. And even ITT those who chose to have kids are still smitten with this idea that life has no meaning without kids. Which was historically a coping mechanism for those previous generations who needed a way to deal with not having a choice.
Having kids seems awful 99.999% of the time. Life has a lot to offer without giving your entire existence over to children, despite the popular belief otherwise
Societal pressure to have children is a huge factor for sure. I’ve heard from previous generations in my family that during the baby boom era, rumors would circulate in their community if you didn’t have enough children, like “something must be wrong with the Johnsons down the street because they only ever had two kids” (and this was in upper-middle class WASP America).
Obviously this attitude continues today in certain communities (Mormons, small rural towns, etc), but it’s no longer as prevalent.
well that and having to watch the kids have a lower quality of life than you had and that includes the part you provide as well as their long term prospects.
Right! There’s no shortage of reasons not to have kids. If I felt they were easy to afford and I knew they’d turn out well, I might just be interested. But no such guarantees exist so yeah I’m not risking being stressed an insane amount for 25%+ of my life.
The behavior I see in kids alone is probably enough though. My kids would have to go to school with that? All the trauma I experienced in school as a kid? Yeah I’m not choosing that for someone else. And I’m absolutely not home schooling either. I know someone whose life was destroyed by that and other choices his parents made.
And if you weren’t clearly in highschool…
Well its never been and never will be a guarantee but its almost a guarantee for not those things this millenium so far and what it would take for it to have good prospects is sci fi level technology.
Guarantee was too strong a word. Replace it with “reason to think that” and my point remains the same
yeah that makes much more sense.
I think previous generations felt they had no choice.
Previous Generation here, you’re wrong.
Life has a lot to offer without giving your entire existence over to children
I’m also a parent and if you are giving your entire existence over to your children then you’re doing it wrong. Yes being a parent means making time and energy for your children but that demand fades the older they get and even while they are young you should still be making time for yourself and your partner.
How old are you? You’re saying you had kids before birth control existed? That’s obviously what I meant
Also I would consider giving hours every day mandatorily giving my life up to someone/something. Just like I feel like my job consumes my life. It does.
And someone with your mindset should not have kids. So, good on you for making that choice. Previous generations knew they had a choice, but they were pressured because having a family was part of “the American Dream”.
I am an older millennial and have a child. Sure, it’s hard work and I sacrifice to give them things they need or want but I wouldn’t change it. His outlook on life, focus on being a good person, and how he views the world at 10 is all amazing. It’s these kids that see through the BS and try and be better that are our future and hope for changing things.
Plus, like it or not, they are the ones that will take care of you when you’re old and suffering and they’re the ones that kind of keep the world running when we’re too old. I guess you can always purchase a gun and off yourself though but to me, that seems horrible rather than saying goodbye and going a lot more peacefully.
If I could buy a house where I live I could consider one. But that won’t be for a long time or I move and start over
I taught my 3 year old to say 'No, thanks", and it’s so cute. He’s so polite and I love him so much 🥹
Is this a surprise? People can barely afford to take care of themselves these days, why would they want to further burden themselves with a child?
Stop stealing everything from the lower and middle classes and giving it all to the rich, and this trend will magically reverse itself.
There was a podcast I listened to a while back that indicated the opposite, the idea was that the better off people are, the less likely they are to have kids. One of the explanations I remember was that the better off people are, kids are just another competing thing that they can do. For example, if you are well off and can go travel for a long period of time, you might be more inclined to do that vs deciding to have kids. Another stat was that birthrates were higher for lower income people.
Nah this is bullshit. Most people want to raise a family in a home they own. Take away that possibility of certainty of having a roof over your head and then planning for a kid sounds scary. If you don’t want to accept that, you could also blame the micro plastics floating around in everyone’s balls now because plastic was considered such a useful byproduct to the petroleum industry.
How do you explain the inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations?
To me it seems counterintuitive that having more money, or like you said about ability to secure a roof over ones head, would mean less chance of having kids but that seems to be a clear trend. Have you actually looked into it or you just making up bullshit?
My experience has been that my coworkers across several jobs that have kids tend to be both less educated and more religious. Regardless of income, my less ignorant coworkers tend not to have kids.
It is hypothesized that the observed trend in many countries of having fewer children has come about as a response to increased life expectancy, reduced child mortality, improved female literacy and independence, and urbanization that all result from increased GDP per capita,consistent with the demographic transition model. The increase in GDP in Eastern Europe after 1990 has been correlated with childbearing postponement and a sharp decline in fertility. In developed countries where birth control is the norm, increased income is likewise associated with decreased fertility. Theories behind this include: People earning more have a higher opportunity cost if they focus on childbirth and parenting rather than their continued career. Women who can economically sustain themselves have less incentive to become married. Higher-income parents value quality over quantity and so spend their resources on fewer children.
From the link you used, it seems to suggest it is less about where they have time to spend and more towards other reasons. The only one that would be affected by choosing between one and the other is between children and continued career but that could be fixed with better access to child care services (day care, etc…)
40 years of a recession will do that to a society. An entire generation fucked.
But there’s no problem with the economy*
*According to metrics that ignore working class savings, inflation, and prices for basic goods and services like groceries and housing increasing faster than inflation.
And jobs are so stable, and give great benefits.
Jobs are so great, many people are working 2 or 3 jobs now! /s
I do have a great job it’s a shame houses in my area cost my entire pay check. It’s not responsible to have a child in those conditions. What kind life would I offer it? If my partner made as much as me what happens if one of loses a job? We would be screwed.
Unbounded growth isn’t progress, it’s a disease.
Literally Cancer’s modus operandi
Not having kids is the only way some of them are gonna be able to afford to live, and less people 30 years from now means they might even be able to afford a place to live if they can retire.
There’s always fearmongering when populations god down, but historically it’s the only time periods normal people can claw back some wealth from the 0.1%
Which is why the wealthy always freak the fuck out. They do t care about people, they care about labor supply, and the more people the cheaper labor.
Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity
The phenomenon of societies having their birth rate fall off as they become wealthier is called the demographic transition.
And further, that correlation exists across a number of axes:
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Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).
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Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).
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Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here’s the US, and more-generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.
Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children.
That’s why the very wealthy want people to keep having lots of kids. Kids make you more willing to take shit in order to feed them and make you poorer and more dependent on your job. That’s not a bad thing about kids, it’s a good thing about parents, but it also makes parents easier to exploit.
Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
Correlation is not causation, there’s no “other way around”…
But what you’re talking about is the drop in fertility due to industrialization and other periods where children worked less and cost more.
That’s different than what I’m talking about; when a labor supply shrinks it means workers get paid more.
That’s just basic supply and demand.
We’re both right, just talking about different things.
I took “rather than the other way around” to mean “rather than negatively-correlated” in this context, since positively was emphasized
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There is the real issue of how a society will support its aged population with significantly less young people working than in the past. It requires changes to regulations and taxation and many nations arent ready to accept that and instead somehow expect the smaller number of young people to just pick up the slack and accept they won’t get to retire when they age.
Or we could just tax the wealthy…
Yes, i mentioned it requires changes to taxation. A lot of the wealthy are the older so they won’t vote in a way that helps young people, they vote in a way to preserve their wealth, even if it means poor social services for people the same age as them but “poor”.
Robots for care
maybe giving people the option for an early peaceful end on thier own terms. It was disgusting watching my great grandfather be trapped in his own body for 10 years. What a horror show. Already planned my way out if it looks like im going to be the same.
Maybe even Basic income for people taking care of elderly family members.
Or better yet basic income for sahm up to 1st grade. Lol could you imagine the pop increase.
Just look at Japan. They’re screwed.
Maybe if hours reduced to 30 for full time people have more kids. Korea talking about upping hours.
Just die at a reasonable age.
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I really can’t comprehend how someone can look at the state of things and think it is appropriate to subject another person to the rat-ass future that’s coming. That’s before you even consider the expense of raising children, which is also prohibitive.
They don’t “look”… Those are the ones that want kids. Those who weight the pros and cons, most likely reach the conclusion that having kids is not feasible.
It’s not only about “not being able to afford them”. Plenty of people in the world “cannot afford” kids and have 7 of them.
It’s the mix of being educated and understanding that it’s not a great idea to have kids, plus the means of being able to prevent or stop pregnancy. Also a cultural shift that allowed us to think by ourself and not feeling forced to have kids.
But the machine need human lubricant to keep working for its owners so they are going to take that from us to ensure we keep making them workers to exploit.
We are already seeing how anti-pregnancy methods are being attacked. And soon they will take away this new culture to bring back the old hivemind culture. And of course the education. There is already a trend on how bad it is for everyone to have a college degree.
Some of us even say, “fuck no.”
And for a non-zero number of those, it’s because no fuck.
Speak for yourself
*fuck for yourself
*fuck yourself
*Fuck
