Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-adults-outnumber-children.html

by geox • 9 months ago

64 113 9 months ago

census.gov

thijson• 9 months ago

A lot of country's population pyramid doesn't look like a pyramid. It's more like a rhombus.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/

I noticed some middle eastern countries have a very skewed male female ratio among people born roughly 30 years ago.

bentcorner2• 9 months ago

Interestingly enough if you change the filter to "US" and rewind the data to 1950 (it looks like that's how far this graph goes), if you advance up by 5 years you can see the "bulge" of baby boomers age up into retirement where they are right now.

zeroonetwothree3• 9 months ago

Very nice. There’s also a second bulge starting around 1990.

whatsupdog3• 9 months ago

The ME countries you are talking about are UAE, Qatar etc. where a lot of labourers are brought in from South Asian countries for construction etc. That's why you see so many 20-40 males.

BenFranklin100• 9 months ago

High housing costs is a key factor.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/31/nx-s1-5551108/housing-costs-b...

The Boomer generation has perpetuated and intensified restrictive zoning. The lack of new homes where well-payong jobs are located has caused housing prices to soar.

The Boomer generation has also led the de-growth movement. I guess they are going to get their way by making it too expensive for their grandkids to have children and cause the population to plummet.

jgalt212• 9 months ago

The greatest generation may have been good at ridding the world of fascism, but not so good at raising responsible and civic-minded adults.

derektank3• 9 months ago

I don't understand why the Baby Boomers are the ones that get blamed for restrictive zoning. The oldest were in their early 30s and the youngest couldn't even vote during the peak of single family zoning activity in the 1970s

SoftTalker• 9 months ago

They voted to perpetuate it since then in the face of many proposals for more relaxed rules.

CSSer2• 9 months ago

Being responsible for the peak of something and having the power to undo it but choosing to do nothing produce the same result.

lazyasciiart7• 9 months ago

Because they’re the ones who’ve been fighting to keep it. I don’t give a shit what happened in the 70s before I was born. I’ve been watching boomers fight for low density zoning since the 90s.

pfannkuchen4• 9 months ago

So I guess it’s the desegregation advocates who are technically at fault? Like that’s when people started using sneaky tricks to maintain segregation. At least before that it was above board and didn’t distort all these other basically unrelated areas (like zoning, and school district “preferences”, etc).

carabiner2• 9 months ago

"If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it."

Aurornis• 9 months ago

You cited an article about people in 2025 talking about whether or not they might have kids in the future.

This census investigation is talking about people under the age of 18, meaning it includes people who were conceived almost two decades ago.

Several states on the list also have significantly above average housing affordability (home price to income ratios) like West Virginia or Pennsylvania.

elzbardico5• 9 months ago

I was born in a Third World country where people sometimes didn't have money to buy food, and yet they reproduced like rabbits. And this is over from what people tell me.

It is cultural. Having kids is low status in the modern world. And it fucking makes a lot of sense. I only like kids because I have kids, my wife wanted to have kids, and I was kind of forced into it. Now, I love having kids, but because I already have them.

beeflet3• 9 months ago

women have lower standards in the third world

jmclnx• 9 months ago

Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Maine, Vermont, and Florida

West Virginia is a surprise to me, I can only guess that is because of young people moving out. Same could probably be said for Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont.

Spooky23• 9 months ago

This isn’t a surprise — it’s been projected since the 80s at least. K-12 is in a trough for the next decade.

ocschwar• 9 months ago

Young people moving out, and those who stay are not inclined to bear children.

hrimfaxi• 9 months ago

Never in my life have I ever seen more notices warning about the dangers of fetal alcohol syndrome than during my brief stay in West Virginia.

sigwinch8• 9 months ago

In particular, West Virginia was a high fertility rate state during the baby boom, among those. Maybe Vermont, too.

more_corn• 9 months ago

Bringing a child into this world would be utter madness.

derektank3• 9 months ago

More crazy than the Cold War? The World Wars? The great flu pandemic? The Chinese Civil Wars? The European Wars of Religion? The Black Death? The Mongol Invasions?

I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)

sQL_inject• 9 months ago

To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.

We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.

In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.

lazyasciiart7• 9 months ago

The demographic crisis of refusing to allow young people and families into the country? You want people to have kids so that we can keep America white?

generativenoise• 9 months ago

The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.

It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.

Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.

deadbolt• 9 months ago

Alright, so why are so many adults not having children, and what do you think should be done to address it?

I have my own ideas, but I'd love to hear your opinion.

spiderice• 9 months ago

Every ancestor of yours since single cell organisms has reproduced. If they could all do it, you can to. Especially given that you live a more cushy life than 99.9999% of them.

bayarearefugee3• 9 months ago

Nobody can afford anything.

It makes no sense to have kids when you can't afford your own existence.

Tax the fucking rich.

raspasov2• 9 months ago

Some of the highest birth rates are in relatively quite poor countries. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rat...

bayarearefugee3• 9 months ago

We still have (for now, though even this is under threat) good access to contraception, good sexual education, relatively low child mortality rates, etc here in the US.

Comparing the affordability crisis for the middle class in the US to that of historically poor developing countries as it relates to birth rates is not a very good argument.

It might be somewhat comparable a decade or so from now if we keep letting wealth inequality run away at current rates, but it isn't right now.

thefz3• 9 months ago

Quite poor countries can plop out an infant and literally do not worry of him ever again. So much for buying him stuff, education, care...

lucyjojo3• 9 months ago

way easier to raise kids when you have a clan/family around, and they generally cost a lot less money/attention.

zeroonetwothree3• 9 months ago

How did people afford existence in 1950 when they made 3x less?

bayarearefugee3• 9 months ago

How did people afford existence in 1950 when they made 3x less?

Is this a serious question?

The average price of a home in 1950 was like $7,500 - $10,000.

The average price of a home in 2025 is like $410,000 - $530,000

Of all the (generally) rising numbers that factor into the US economy, wages is one of the major things that has risen the least since the 1950s, and especially so since 1980.

elzbardico5• 9 months ago

Things are far worse in China. That's the only reason I am bullish in the US as world's top dog for the foreseable future.

SlightlyLeftPad• 9 months ago

I wouldn’t believe any estimates you see from China first of all. China also has a unique history and the ability to turn things around very quickly. That said, what’s the point of comparing other than to confirm your own belief that this is the single most important aspect of a thriving country?

elzbardico5• 9 months ago

Yeah, but the US have this perennial luck too. I am generation X, I was raised first with the idea that japan would overcome the US, then it was the EU. and yet, the US always reinvented itself/got lucky/played dirty.

Empires are fucking resilient creations. The news of US hegemony demise are vastly exagerated.

nsoonhui2• 9 months ago

I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countries and Europe, but still, the trend is unmistakable -- modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth.

All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.

Arainach5• 9 months ago

modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth

Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'

"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.

Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.

agsqwe• 9 months ago

Then countries with even more greedy elites would have even lower rates, which is not the case.

A few examples of fertility rates (higher is better, 2023 data):

  Sweden: 1.45
  US: 1.62
  Kenya: 3.21

zeroonetwothree3• 9 months ago

US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently.

I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.

Glawen• 9 months ago

Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints.

They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices

dariosalvi782• 9 months ago

That's part of the problem, but the trend is universal, so it's not only that. I think that reduction of human population is good, but we need to rethink our economic models entirely, which nobody is doing, at least not seriously enough

txrx00004• 9 months ago

Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'

OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though.

AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children.

Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient.

The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.

C6JEsQeQa5fCjE• 9 months ago

Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low.

Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.

adverbly• 9 months ago

I sort of agree with you.

To get some sober second thought though, you could watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s

It tears down the strawman case of demographic collapse, but I'm with you that its still pretty scary looking and quite unprecedented.

TFYS2• 9 months ago

Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.

nsoonhui2• 9 months ago

I am not sure will all culture remain immune to the "curse" of modern comfortable lives that lead to low birthrates. This remains unproven.

And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.

dariosalvi782• 9 months ago

Except religious fanatics, the trend is universal and driven by other factors than abortion or contraception

txrx00004• 9 months ago

It's a problem we chose to create for ourselves by inventing and socially normalizing 99% effective birth control. We've given ourselves the freedom to make the choice to have children consciously, but not without consequences, some of which have already caught up to us.

In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly.

If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman.

But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.

rufus_foreman• 9 months ago

> I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now

This is similar in some ways to the situation when I was young where population growth was the single biggest crisis facing the developed world.

Either way, we're doomed.

rainsford2• 9 months ago

What's fascinating to me about this shift is that I've yet to see a clearly identified root cause. Some people on the left identify cost of living and things like that, but we're generally richer and better off than ever and still having fewer kids. In fact higher standards of living seem generally negatively correlated with number of children. Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents.

Given those things, I wonder if there is an actual problem here or we just don't have the experience to see how it resolves. It's hard to see the side effects of increased standards and living or more choice and equality for women as inherently bad or something we need to fight against, especially when there seem to be few effective solutions that are compatible with a free and modern society.

bentcorner2• 9 months ago

Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents.

The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small.

Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash.

IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease.

It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.

Gibbon1• 9 months ago

Cost disease applies to children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

We aren't supposed to think of children as an economic good. For one children don't pay money for their care so it's difficult for capital to exploit the relationship. Unpaid work especially done by women is valued at zero. Or seen as a sunk cost.

If we reject that than we see that it takes similar amounts of time and labor to raise children as it did a 100 years ago. Other resources have increased. Particularly raising children in an urban environment costs more than rural. And unlike rural children's labor has no value in urban environments. That totally sets up cost disease.

I've been thinking along the lines of generalized Malthusian limits it's not just malnutrition and disease that limits population growth. Toss in cost disease and you can argue for urban, capitalist industrial economies we've overshot some nebulous limit that doesn't show up in mortality statistics.

piperswe• 9 months ago

Not super surprising given the baby boom that many of those older adults were born during - it was an anomalous spike in birth rates after all.

thefz3• 9 months ago

There's going to be an inflection point with more elderly than young population, then all the old folks are going to die, so what? All the fear mongering about societal collapse and the inevitable doom are just populist arguments because the underlying fear is to be replaced by young immigrants from poor countries.

illiac7865• 9 months ago

no, if people have 1 kid per woman for generations, then the ratio between young and old will remain the same, we will just get less and less people overall.

Seeing that actually the number of kid per woman is not stable but actually dropping worldwide, the ratio between old and young will get even worse than it is today.

tsoukase• 9 months ago

Demographic is an unsolvable problem. Since the last 30 years every effort of countries has failed. From Denmark's sexy ads to the "Flirting" Ministry of Singapore, only superficial results in the correct direction. It seems that behind every social factor, a depressed basic animal reproductive instinct is the common mechanism.

txrx00004• 9 months ago

This isn't true. The current birth rate crisis is artificially induced by the widespread production and use of birth control pills.[0] If you look at the fertility rate graph, it fell off a cliff from 1960-1975 when the pill was introduced and has remained relatively stable ever since.[1] America's fertility rate would be well above replacement if we never invented the pill.

Popular socioeconomic explanations for why people are having fewer children aren't wrong, but those aren't the biggest factors. They likely explain the drop from 2008-present, but this recent drop is nothing compared to the 1960-1975 pill cliff. If you claim the socioeconomic problems are unsolvable (which I don't think is true either), there is still the option of regulating the pill as a controlled substance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

amriksohata• 9 months ago

I never got the argument that its too expensive so we can't have kids. Look at the most impoverished countries - they have much less money but have more kids and often strong senses of purpose and community.

All of it is societys perception, how we are being bought up as men and women, our actual purpose, and greed that has killed the desire for children.

sigwinch8• 9 months ago

On the other end, the wealthiest have high fertility as well. What have the middle classes concluded about their prospects with and without children?

carabiner2• 9 months ago

Yes it is affordable if one raises their kids in an environment without running water or reliable electricity or healthcare. Those places have the highest infant mortality rates in the world and you can't compare their viability of child rearing to that of a first world.

anal_reactor2• 9 months ago

To me, it all seems very simple, and I don't understand if my opinion is profoundly stupid or everyone else is blind.

1. For the first time in human history, it's a viable thing to live alone. Not only that, but actually living alone is easier than living with a spouse. If you want to be married you have to put a lot of effort into dealing with the other person. If you're single, nothing stops you from just eating frozen pizza and playing video games all you want. 100 years ago most people were farmers, and good luck trying to farm land alone, especially as a woman. Once the economic survival necessity to marry disappeared, the naked truth was exposed - people just don't like each other. We'd rather sit alone.

2. When people were finally taught "if you put penis into vagina without latex, a child will pop out, and you will need to keep feeding it for next twenty years", the reaction was "fuck that" because honestly, parenthood is just a bad deal. Nature got around this problem by equipping us with sex drive and for most animals that works because most animals don't make the mental connection between sex and pregnancy, but modern people do make the connection, which breaks the system.

3. Demographic collapse is actually not a problem. Humanity will not die out. It's just a giant evolutionary bottleneck, like many in history. Will the society collapse? Maybe. Not the first and not the last time.

4. Even if the society collapses, a better one will emerge. Black Death killed half of Europe's population, and some historians say that this contributed to Renaissanace, which was a major postive turning point. Labor shortages led to much better position of common workers, and the last time I checked, common workers bitched about being exploited.

Balgair2• 9 months ago

4. Even if the society collapses, a better one will emerge. Black Death killed half of Europe's population, and some historians say that this contributed to Renaissanace, which was a major postive turning point. Labor shortages led to much better position of common workers, and the last time I checked, common workers bitched about being exploited.

Nit-Pick:

The Renaissance is more of the exception that proves the rule than anything. If you look at other plagues history they typically don't result in any large scale changes in society, just misery usually. Unfortunately (?) the data is a bit sparse here, as large scale deaths like this are a bit rare in history, so there really aren't that many plagues to study. But, I think my point still stands, the Renaissance was an outlier, not an expected result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...

anal_reactor2• 9 months ago

True, that's the weakest of my points. But the rest is solid, I think.

Balgair2• 9 months ago

One of the 'fun' areas on the net to hang out on is the 'baby-o-sphere' here where everyone is fretting about these demographic collapses. 'Fun' in the way the old net was, as everyone in this area would never talk with each other otherwise.

You get hardcore communists, evangelical christians, muslim scholars, boring census interpreters, etc. It's a whole lot of people out on the fringes of some bell curve that are all worried about this one little thing. I imagine climate change people were like this in the early days. It's a bit heartening as people who normally are enemies ideologically will share tips and news of studies. A little preview of a better future. And so a nicer place to hang out than the regular doomer internet.

Thing is with the 'baby-o-sphere', it's a lot like the plot of TNG's The Chase ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)), in that, you know once the little key or recipe that is discovered that will reliably change birthrates, then everyone is going to scatter and start hating each other again. C'est la vie.

lucyjojo3• 9 months ago

raising multiple kids when both parents work, you have no community to help, and you can't afford child care, is very, very, hard.

plus, parents care more what happen to their kids these days, which turns even more time consuming

Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States

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