It's Not Just You. No One Wants Kids Anymore [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-PinTQcuik

by Rinzler89 • 2 years ago

41 120 2 years ago

foobarkey• 2 years ago

I want kids, probably 3, working on it

gizajob2• 2 years ago

I want kids too. I already have one who is 16 that I don’t have a very good relationship but I’d love to have a family where I could be a parent this time around. Didn’t really get to the first time.

ChumpGPT2• 2 years ago

Never to late to fix things.

joak• 2 years ago

I already have kids, love them, happy to have more. My kids, others kids make me happy. Is this generation going to have a better life than the previous ones? I think so. I don't understand too frequent self defeating doomism.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 2 years ago

We stopped at 2 mainly because the education costs would have been very high, and you need a special car once you get to 3

atmavatar• 2 years ago

That depends on how much trunk space you have ;)

abhiyerra2• 2 years ago

Not ready for the minivan lifestyle?

xkbarkar• 2 years ago

My take is a combination of factors

- Decreased fertility ( Obesity maybe? )

- Cost of housing.

- Children in the west are now overprotected little dictators and parents are no longer allowed to be humans with their own needs.

Side rant:

I just saw a linkedin post with a woman being flamed for choosing not not attend childs first day of school because she had an important work event to attend to.

  Father attended, not mother.  Mother thus declared incompetent child abuser.

I would never choose to have a child today. Mine are born just two seconds before the western world turned insane on parental demands. And kids are assholes. I love mine, but small children are generally selfish, oppurtunistic douchebags.

Seing what my poor younger collegues go through today I would absolutely abstain from having any.

Living on the edge of financial ruin and sleep depravation to pay half my income for a child that can threaten to call the social sevices on you for forcing them to bicycle to school instead of being driven by car is an easy choice not to make.

Oddly specific story is a danish one from a collegue. They have a kids emergency phone or something in Denmark that is supposed to be used for abused children to alarm authorities of violence etc. Said collegue was reported, by their 11 year old, for failing to drive the kid to school and giving them bicycles instead. To add insult to injury, its an expensive private school they attend and denmark is a bicycle country.

The authorities of course just dismissed the complaint and nothing ever happened. Kid had to bicycle.

They have to investigate according to law though. And file a report.

Sorry long rant. I feel genuinly sorry for young people trying to start a family.

Bringing a child to the western world demands double phds in child psychiatry and Kardashian money.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

Why are people talking about their kids on LinkedIn? Also if I tried something like that with my mom I wouldn't see daylight for a year.

nytesky• 2 years ago

I think my kids are older than, yours as they are applying to college.

My impression is that kids have always been terrible, and even my teen is self-involved and arrogant and short tempered with siblings despite all external perspectives are that they are a quite decent and competent human.

Fertility is dropping, maybe it’s a factor, but being centered in developed nations it’s just the universal problem for 20 years: housing.

Housing costs outstripped income since the 90s, and post pandemic and post inflation busting interest rates, providing the type of stable life to your kids seems unattainable.

With kids you need bigger housing, you need a bigger car or a car at all, you need that housing to be some place safe and probably short distance from good schools. Even if you can afford that, which we can barely manage, than all our cash goes into housing, and there is less for retirement and college funds.

Yes, people can accept cramped conditions or take a gamble their kids won’t be impact by a gritty neighborhood gang or what not, but people just decide to wait, hope for better fortunes, and then whoops no babies anymore.

add-sub-mul-div2• 2 years ago

I totally agree about the cost issues. But could I suggest that maybe giving too much weight to social media "flaming" is related to also giving too much weight to dramatic anecdotes and mistaking them for trends?

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Decreased fertility ( Obesity maybe? )

Obesity may be a factor. But many people at least try to not have kids until they're married and stable. And people are marrying later. And female fertility declines and then stops with age.

BriggyDwiggs42• 2 years ago

I mean, you just described a system which is meant to protect kids from abuse that worked as intended when someone attempted to take advantage of it. I don’t think its the government trying to reduce abuse, I think its just the money.

anononaut• 2 years ago

It's a tragedy in slow motion. Symptom or cause, this will make the next decades very bleak.

lm284692• 2 years ago

Almost everything is based on infinite growth and an increasing amount of consumers/taxpayers. Breaking the ponzi scheme now is as good as breaking it in 50 years

carlmr4• 2 years ago

Exactly on point. The more we grow the bigger the future catastrophe.

shadowgovt3• 2 years ago

Arguably better, since the ponzi scheme runs on under-constrained fossil fuel extraction and exhaustion that is both unsustainable and risks collapsing the planetary biosphere.

The sooner we stop assuming this planet can support unlimited human beings, the better.

whatnotests2• 2 years ago

I want kids, but would not raise them in America.

GoToRO2• 2 years ago

When rich people fire tens of thousands of workers without any repercusion, nobody wants to have kids?

sfmz• 2 years ago

Birth rates are also low in European countries with strong worker protections.

theshrike79• 2 years ago

Even though there is a good social safety net and worker protections, kids are still relatively expensive in both time and money.

Nobody _wants_ to neglect their kid because their job requires 10-12 hours of their time per day. Nobody wants their kid to not have the things they want because they can't afford it.

There still are people who literally YOLO kids and somehow make do, others consider and wait for The Best Time and poof they're 40 and in line for IVF.

Rinzler895• 2 years ago

Layoffs still happen in Europe too.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

There have been tyrants through the ages who have killed tens of thousands of people without repercussion and the Survivors still had kids..

GoToRO2• 2 years ago

I lived under such a tyrant and what people don't realize it's just how peaceful it is. Sure, economically the whole country was shit and you were not allowed to say the tyrant was a tyrant, but everything else was butter smooth. Now I feel it's too much noise but also actual randomness (now we hire, now we fire) and it's hard to have any real stability.

the_optimist• 2 years ago

Thousands of years of more severe precedent challenges have been overcome.

You are stronger than you think. The light you seek is within you.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

I love my kids, but I do often look at the state of things and wonder if having them was doing them a disservice.

toomuchtodo5• 2 years ago

I too love my kids, and would not make the choice again. Timing is everything, and this is not a macro favorable to humans and parenting. I now do whatever I can to help people who don't want kids not have them. The cost of failure is simply too high. To those who want them, all I can say is "You're on your own, no one is coming to save you. I wish you luck, but don't be shocked when the outcome goes south."

From this video's Youtube comments:

“Governments aren’t trying to create self actualized, happy, positive individuals. They’re trying to create meat for the grinder.” Rational actors are making rational decisions based on the environment they are operating in and their options available.

cafard• 2 years ago

Really? I see a fair number of small children in my neighborhood, aged from less than a year on up. If we grant that anymore extends back as much as six years, I'd say that quite a few grownups haven't got the message.

llamaimperative• 2 years ago

I wonder if there's data on this so we don't need to rely on neighborhood vibes...

burner_flameon• 2 years ago

No, quite a few grownups _in your neighborhood_ haven't gotten the message. The reasons why your neighbors may not be a representative sample of the 8-billion-ish humans on Earth are left as an exercise for the reader.

add-sub-mul-div2• 2 years ago

I am begging you people to understand how the context of words informs whether they're intended to be taken literally or figuratively.

seanw4444• 2 years ago

Had my first kid this year. Will definitely be having more. Does it require a less comfy and selfish lifestyle? Definitely. I'll get to my deathbed and regret not having a family of my own to enjoy time with. Pro tip: it's always been "the wrong time" to have kids. It never gets good enough to be easy.

nativespecies4• 2 years ago

So not having kids is selfish? Ha. Ok.

carlmr4• 2 years ago

I see a lot of parents say this. They somehow think their kids are a gift to the world.

To me climate change, overpopulation causing insane resource consumption make it look kind of selfish when people want their own kids.

I understand that in terms of social systems we "need" more kids to support the old. But at the same time these kids will grow old at some point as well, and if you always need more kids than old people that means you need growth forever, which just means you're kicking the can down the road and creating more environmental issues in the meantime.

Have kids, don't have kids, whatever. But don't pretend like you did something selfless.

If people were having more kids we'd just have a bigger demographic collapse in the future.

lynguist• 2 years ago

When you were a kid for the first 20 years society provided for it - schooling etc. A day of school will easily cost the community 1000 $/€ of public money per day.

After that the kids turn into net positives that finance the rest of society.

A society that is declining in population because of a large number of people actively choosing to not have kids means that they are not “doing their part” to build our society.

It sounds weird and abstract, but on a large scale makes sense.

By the time you stop working society gives you more for your life, they maintain and uphold society and pay for your retirement. When you don’t have children you only take from then on without returning to society.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 2 years ago

Having kids is a selfish act by definition (I'm a parent): you have kids for yourself, not for the kids

illiac7862• 2 years ago

Hmmm, I see more and more of the opposite. Children are consuming more resources we don’t have, how can you put a child into this world heading into oblivion anyway, etc.

nashashmi4• 2 years ago

the wrong time

Would you consider lack of marriage stability as a reason to not have kids yet?

thisOtterBeGood• 2 years ago

No. We have two kids and have been agreeing on a third. There are no rational arguments for another child: We will sacrifice sleep, money, self-entertainment. It always results in more work for parents.

benterix2• 2 years ago

Definitely. I believe most people would see the "wrong time" as lack of financial stability. Not being able to depend on a partner is a recipe for a broken family and not a very happy lifer for the child (first-hand experience).

seanw4444• 2 years ago

Yeah. I was mostly directing that towards the "the world is going to shit" crowd. I'm also a part of that crowd, but it irks me when people think we're in a unique situation. The world's always been going to shit. It goes to shit in rather short cycles.

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

I am 40 and have three children that are teenagers. They are the most important part of my life, have been transformative in my life and would do it over in a second. I did zero family planning because I was in a position where having a child was just assumed as part of life and I could afford it (most can). I wasn’t pressured or forced by my community to, but I didn’t actively try to prevent it once I was married.

What I describe above was basically the way people lived with respect to “family planning” since all biological history unto the last few hundred years - namely they didn’t do any

The world has changed in the last 100 years - likely for the better - in that we’re now intentional and forceful about consentful sex, accessible birth control, accessible abortion etc…such that fertility isn’t just taken for granted and is fully in the hands (ideally) of the birth mother.

The result is that most of my peers on the other hand either have one or zero kids. Why? Cause they actively tried not to have kids. Now the ones who want them are struggling with IVF or HRT etc… and having even one is a blessing.

It’s a new world and all the old assumptions about human life don’t hold because we’ve been so successful in building systems and controls for what we’re previously magical, mystical processes.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 2 years ago

I'm 35 with two children and completely agree with you. The sad state of things is that is not assumed anymore you will have children (the opposite). For example, there used to be many family movies (movies that both adults and children could enjoy), but now I can't find many. There are kids movies or adults movies, but family movies are more rare.

None of my friends in 2 countries had children (I'm an immigrant). That's shocking, all families with children I had to meet after I had them.

Anyway lucky services for families are strong and we can enjoy the time together, but my prospective growing up was to share this also with my friends, so the realization it wouldn't be the case was sad. All of them are losing so much.

happytoexplain• 2 years ago

This is worded in a way that is a little confusing to me. "Not planning" to have children because "having a child was just assumed", and just letting it happen whenever it happens, is still an explicit plan to have children, regardless of whether it falls under the umbrella of "family planning" as a formal term. Now, people are explicitly deciding not to have children. This would be true regardless of how actively or inactively people used to approach child-having.

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

Yes well that’s the point

Until the 1970s there was no reliable way to decide to not have children while still being sexually active.

That’s a well researched and documented change in biology that continues to be ignored for how massively impactful it has been on society.

We take it for granted that you can have regular sex and not have a kid as a result. That’s extraordinarily new and powerful in human history.

Said another way: The base rate of likelihood of having a child as a result of having sex has dropped to ~1% given the prevalence of oral contraception (99% with perfect use + Plan-B) and abortion (for gaps in perfect contraceptive use) from ~20% which was the failure rate of the most successful method of interruption + synchronization with menstrual cycle, prior to oc.

A 20x drop in desired children is non-trivial and reflects a 20x base rate change.

lurking152• 2 years ago

in that we’re now intentional and forceful about consentful sex, accessible birth control, accessible abortion etc

I guess this is Progressive in the 1920s sense (as much as the faux-sophisticates think they've outgrown the past, they've really just doubled-down), since the black population would have been much larger now otherwise

AndrewKemendo3• 2 years ago

This is as close to a dog whistle as I think is probably still socially allowable. However your supposition is so fraught that it’s not worth a cogent response other than highlighting that the concept that abortion is “Black Genocide” has been long recognized by the black community as being a flag that white progressives like to wave to tokenize and use black women as pawns for their puritanical ideas.

dzhiurgis2• 2 years ago

No amount of netflix or bars can replace single hug from my 4yo

soganess• 2 years ago

I would like to have kids, so I understand your intention here...

But no amount of hugs from your 4yo would replace the 3-week 3000/4000-mile 38-state(USA) road trip my close friends and I took traveling the state and national parks. We hiked, cave dove (dived??), camped, and lived out a rented mini-van. Not to mention all the little road trip memories and folks we met along the way.

Things are not always comparable, pretending they are really misses the mark. Someone might meet the love of their life at a bar. Someone might see a documentary about their homeland that inspires them to find their roots. We have no idea what the lasting effects of a single event might be.

jemmyw• 2 years ago

Once you have a 4yo quite a lot of netflix replaces your bars

ajma• 2 years ago

In my tech crowd, I often have the most kids (four). Sometimes I meet others with 4 but it's pretty rare. I have a non-tech group of friends. With four, I'm probably more average.

me_me_me• 2 years ago

where do you live? Israel or Kazakhstan?

4 kids per family as 'average' is almost unheard of in the industrialized world

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

There are two and only two ways to increase population. The first is via birthrate, (either more people having kids, or having mroe kids per couple) The second is immigration. Immigration can increase the population of available workers now, birthrate obviously has a delay. I expect both political parties in the US will find a rationale to become much more permissive about immigration. the alternative is not good.

ChumpGPT2• 2 years ago

Kids are absolutely amazing. The more time parents invest in them, the more amazing they are. It's a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.

mattgreenrocks• 2 years ago

It's the most fulfilling work of my life. No career can get close to how impactful it is.

It's also a really effective way to really learn that life isn't about you. Not the only way, of course, but a very good one.

TeeMassive• 2 years ago

The primary factor of people not starting families is the disappearance of blue collar working class jobs.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the recent hacker News article talking about the overcrowded rat experiment, where the rats also chose not to have children

NoMoreNicksLeft6• 2 years ago

They didn't "choose" it. Their behavior malfunctioned because their conditions made them neurotic. And that behavior persisted even after it was no longer overcrowded due to die-off, probably because of cultural transmission: females who grew to maturity in that environment conditioned what offspring they did have to have those same behaviors regardless of crowding or lack thereof.

In the 1990s, I remember being bombarded with messages that "adoption was just as good as having your own child". In high school by teachers, when there was opportunity. From television and media. We've been conditioned too. I won't call it deliberate, but even if it were inadvertent would it matter? No words even have to be said, if you're a young child and they send you to school with other young children, and everyone you know is an only child, what do you grow up to think is the correct number of children for adults to have? The simple answer is "one", but there's an implicit "or zero" that should be tacked on. The children see these "zeros" too, when they notice the adults around them are childless.

Those children don't grow up and choose not to any more than the rats chose not to.

shadowgovt3• 2 years ago

Worth highlighting in this video is the discovery in the data by the Economist that more than half of the drop in the US fertility rate is from women aged 15-19 choosing to not have children in that age range.

The significant birthrate drop turns out to be an unexpected consequence of a societal goal that various moral actors in the US had been working towards for decades.

Chris2048• 2 years ago

The commenter describes them as a "backbone", but I'm a little sceptical - Do we really want an economy propped up by unplanned births, and the unwilling, difficult labour of single parents?

Also, they never correlate with actual future tax contributions vs use of services, rendering the raw birthrate comparison meaningless..

shadowgovt3• 2 years ago

Sort of a hallmark of American cognitive dissonance about their place in the global economy is the disconnect between the reality on the ground of how their country makes money and what they want the truth of that story to be.

In the modern era for example, we know that American agriculture is basically backstopped by undocumented and underdocumented labor of immigrant workers. Successful 100% enforcement of immigration law and border security would result in a food crisis due to a lack of hands to pick the harvest (because farm incomes are not sustainable paying a standard American living wage).

Illegal immigration is currently the backbone of the American agricultural economy, and it's an inconvenient truth that Americans like to ignore.

dnel2• 2 years ago

Have two kids, I always wanted a family around me and I love having them but I don't blame people for making other choices, it is very hard.

We were 34 when we had our firstborn, 38 for 2nd, waiting to be financially stable enough, be on the housing ladder etc, but now one of my wife's parents is elderly, the other is dead, one of mine is still working due to delayed state pension age, and the other is raising step grand-kids. Siblings emmigrated and live thousands of miles away so we're on our own in a country that does very little to help parents with astronomical childcare costs, some of the most expensive in Europe.

It's a system set up to prevent the next generation from existing, while at the same time the country that is literally rioting against the immigration needed to plug the gap. Sure, call it the "far right" but the sentiments are muttered by many more moderate voices.

I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.

NoMoreNicksLeft6• 2 years ago

Immigration doesn't plug the gap, it causes the costs to rise that people complain is the reason for them not having or wanting children. I don't particularly believe that high costs of living are the real reason, seems more like a rationalization to me (else we'd see number of children go smoothly up with higher income, and we don't really see that). But it does seem to be the popular response.

Does immigration cause the lower fertility, or does lower fertility cause the immigration? Why can't it be both, death spiral style?

azemetre• 2 years ago

How do you square this opinion with countries like South Korea or Japan, two of which both have extremely low immigration and low fertility?

I think the, more obvious IMO, answer is that as a species we no longer have an optimistic vision of the future.

Income inequality is rising around the world and in certain elitist circles there are serious discussions about creating a neo-aristocracy/neo-feudalism. Where are the stories about bettering ourselves? Why does it feel like we have to fight the fights of our ancestors to demand the same rights that they bled for?

It's depressing and collectively I think the vast majority of us recognize this and feel powerless.

People want to fight climate change, but a handful of individuals are able to stop all progress? People want to usher in new civil rights, but now we have to continue to fight for the same rights previous peoples had? People want better welfare programs, but we have to fight to return to previous tax structures that enabled this decades ago?

How can you tell an optimistic vision of the future when people are actively fighting, and winning, against it?

dnel2• 2 years ago

It's an oversimplification to say it is just about the cost of living, but its an easy to understand reduction of the problem that is far more complex and what I'm saying is that the consequences of high housing prices/rents and a lack of financial stability in our boom and bust economy is delaying parenthood, and this leads towards the failure of the familial support network that is critical to raising children.

techdmn• 2 years ago

Also, the defect rate on children is surprisingly high, around 3% if memory serves. As the parent of a child with disabilities, my experience has been one of complete devastation. I'm not in a good enough place to have a conversation about this, but also feel an obligation to others in a similar position not to be invisible.

nativespecies4• 2 years ago

My nephew is severely autistic. My brother and his wife struggle mightily and my hat is off to him. I don’t have the strength to do something like that, so I add it as another reason children are not for me.

nine_zeros4• 2 years ago

I dunno - can I have some protection of income when management decides to fire me because I am taking care of my pregnant wife?

Can my wife also have pregnancy protection?

As a society, can we protect humans from capitalistic predators who will literally cut off food from your table because some KPI is temporarily not met?

Rinzler895• 2 years ago

The video touches on that, in that birth rates are low even in countries where all those protections exist so it's not just that.

nine_zeros4• 2 years ago

Not all countries with protection have similar protection.

Most countries with protection have patchwork laws that are easily broken.

Even the US has laws that pregnant people cannot be discriminated against but they face retaliation and discrimination by citing other means - a patchwork law with no teeth.

lylejantzi3rd• 2 years ago

The future belongs to those who show up for it. If you don't have kids, that means the future is going to belong to children raised by far right radical parents (since those are most of the people who are choosing to have children these days). Do you really want the future of the country decided by people who were raised with those values?

Gud• 2 years ago

In my experience, people have very different opinions from their parents.

silverquiet2• 2 years ago

I've never even felt like the present belonged to me now matter how much I showed up; I know for sure the future doesn't, and frankly I've found more peace since I've accepted that.

rich_sasha• 2 years ago

I wonder what the endgame is. What will happen in 20 years time?

One option is that immigrants will pick up the baton. Old childless people might complain about immigrants from XYZ yet pay them for support. Perhaps other jobs will likewise be filled by people emigrating from poorer countries.

Another is the same, but the economic growth will slow in these aging societies, and the rich aging countries will turn into poor old countries, without the means to attract immigrants. For different reasons, but the UK labour market is really struggling, as since Brexit it is harder to attract migrant workers in sought after professions. Why should you go do menial jobs in the US if India or Vietnam or Albania is booming, fuelled by healthy demographics, and the US is getting poorer? These now-old countries will sell off their economy for support, basically, a bit how the UK has been selling off bits of it to sustain cash balances. Or go without young hands to do the work, and implode in slow motion.

Maybe having children will again become net positive. But if course the lead time on productive humans from scratch is very long.

amriksohata2• 2 years ago

He said something about young single women are really important to society because the under 19s are no longer having children. THis is somewhat a conflation. Under 19s , 30-40 years ago were probably less likely to be single mums. Thats not to say they did not exist, but there were far fewer.

amriksohata2• 2 years ago

He also missed things like divorce laws which now massively favour women, why would a man get married and want to settle and have kids, if half or more is taken away of his castle, his kids and everything he owns.

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

I have 2 older teenagers, we live in a very comfortable suburb of Paris, top schools etc. If not for my wife's MS we would have had two more because it was fun, we can afford it and we are in a safe place with a bright future for the kids.

I had a discussion with my kids about them having children. They do not want any because of the state of the world. I was with them and told them that if I was in their shoes, knowing how great having kids is - I would not have any either.

I simply would not want them to live in the world I will leave behind.

baggy_trough2• 2 years ago

This is by far the best time to be alive for any human in history.

illiac7862• 2 years ago

I think the best time was maybe a decade ago, it’s going downward and the outlook is bad.

Humans cannot deal well with decline/degradation, it’s very painful to us. Like having a little less money every month – so much worse than having much less money suddenly and then slowly more every month again, even if the total amount of money is the same.

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

Right now, yes. My hypothetical grand-children would be 30 around 2060.

With the disastrous predictions for basically everything, and especially climate, I would not to be at my peak at that time.

abhiyerra2• 2 years ago

I had a son in the last year. I wanted to be a young dad around 26 but had him at 36. The turning point to having him was when my wife’s friends started having kids. After having a kid she realized how much we love having him. But a delay in that is that the 20s are a critical period for both sexes to built their career. Even though I wanted to be a young dad I did not want her to give up her career over it. Even as a dad who tries to take on a bunch of workload the amount of work that goes to the mother is just significantly higher than the dad.

But as a corollary to delaying having kids is that biologically we are not made to have kids so late and my wife and her friends have all experienced complications dues to it.

It's Not Just You. No One Wants Kids Anymore [video]

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