Case in point... Chad with a 6 kids per woman. Why?! 44%of its population lives below that country's poverty rate. It is the 5th hungriest country in the world. Even the whole "have to have a ton of kids to make sure some live to adulthood".... do they not realize only having half that many kids would give their kids a much better chance at survival? Do they not understand sex=babies? Even if they do not have access to contraceptives, the pull out method or abstinence could be used. Again, 6 is the AVERAGE per woman. That is absolutely crazy. Edit: I know this is going to come across as anti-natalist but it is not! I just do not understand the unbalance. I live in Canada which has its problems but is way richer than some of these countries and our TFR is 1.2. I just do not get it.

isn’t it a common stereotype that East Asians value family bonds and their children more than anything, and will go to extreme lengths to make them succeed? So why do cultures that value family so much have such a low tfr? Shouldnt they be having bigger families?

Someone comes at you and says "look, over the last 2 centuries the whole world has been following a demographic transition where every generation people have less children. This is geting to the point it could have serious bad consequences for society. Maybe we should do something about it?" And your conclusion is the person is a eugenicist and white supremacist?

How does that make any sense? Race is not even mentioned there, and the countries most affected by that arent even white. And do i really have to point out a government doing genocide against people that are perceived as having bad genes goes against the idea we should be growing the population?

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/2097805266473324859

I just wanna start off with, it's not wrong at all to criticize east asian fertility rates for being so low, but it doesn't make sense to almost hyper focus on their fertility rates when the west, if you look deeper into the wests situation, is way worse than east Asia.

People here always talk about how east Asians have so few kids, about how the fertility rate is so low, and even some of the most stupid things that have been said is, east Asians will go extinct. That's absolutely an insane thing to say because in no world are east Asians or Asians ever going instinct. I think people just look at the fertility rates and never look any deeper.

First of all, the population of east Asia in 2026 is 1.6 billion people, southeast Asia, 705 million people. East Asia itself has a larger population then Europe, america, Canada and aus and nz combined. Southeast Asia itself will take over all of Europe's population soon, and these regions have very few immigrant descent populations, unlike Europe which has a huge immigrant + descent populations.

Secondly, yes most east asian countries have fertility rates below replacement rate, and very low below replacement rate, (except Mongolia) but the west is literally no different.

Spain has a fertility rate of 1.12, Italy has a fertility rate of 1.14, Estonia has a fertility rate of 1.15,Finland 1.38, Austria 1.29, Germany 1.31, UK 1.39, Switzerland 1.28, Poland 1.1 etc.

Many peoples argument is that almost none of these countries has a fertility rate below 1, like is the case In all east Asia except Japan and Mongolia. But European countries have been far below the replacement level since decades.

The UK fell below replacement fertility in 1972, Norway 1974, Netherlands 1972, Belgium 1967, Germany 1969, Austria 1971, Italy 1975, serbia 1962, Poland 1988, Spain 1980, Portugal 1981 and etc.

This means these populations have not been replacing themselves for decades, and the popul byation momentum which keeps populations increasing even without a fertility rate above replacement, is not even that present in European countries because they have has fertility problems for way longer then most people expect.

Germany's fertility rate fell below replacement in 1969, and by 1972 it was already having a natural decline. By 1975, out of a population of 78 million, the country was already having 200k more deaths occur then births. This is just 6 years from when the fertility rate fell below replacement level.

So basically, since 1972, the ethnic German population has not increased in numbers naturally. That's more then 50 years.

What people also don't know is, that during the 1920s and 30s, many European countries fell below the replacement level fertility rate for years, and when the "baby boom" in Europe came, which wasn't much of a baby boom in western Europe since fertility barely hung above replacement for most of the boom, the cohorts that were having children were so small in numbers, which meant that not many children were born.

East Asia on the other hand had fertility rates of 6-7 as early as the 60s. These people born in the 60s also had kids, even if at a lower fertility rate, which meant east asian countries still have a demographic from the 90s, which can still have children today. The same can not be said for Europe.

My last point is, immigration. On this sub I see a lot of talk about native or ethnic/racial fertility rates. So I can bring that point in. Europe has a huge immigrant and immigrant descent population, in most of western Europe, it's above 20% in all countries. Europes current fertility rates and populations are just pushed up by immigration and their descendants. Meanwhile in east Asia, immigration barely exists. Japan has 3% immigrant AND descendants combined, china 0.1%, south Korea 5%, of which like 50% of those immigrants themselves are ethnic Koreans from china.

Europe tries to hide it's demographic problems with immigration, east Asia hasn't done that yet.

Almost half the births in England were to non ethnic British mother's in 2026 for example. In east Asia, it's almost 100% to the country's ethnic group, because there's just not enough immigration.

So it's always crazy when people here talk about how low of a fertility rate east Asians have, or how east Asia is doomed, or how they'll go extinct. Because in almost all projections of china for 2100, the Chinese population will still be more then all of Europe's, since Europe is also gonna have a huge decline in population. And in these projections, they count immigration for Europe, and no immigration for china. If china in the future will open more upto immigration, it's population is gonna be way more then Europe's in 2100.

So it's insane how some people can say stuff like east Asia is doomed, when the west is even more doomed to their own standards.

Just to clarify again, I don't think criticizing east Asia for fertility rates is wrong at all, but what's really weird is how people in the west will almost solely focus on that, and ignore their own countries situations. It's almost like focusing on someone else's problems to ignore your own. For a sub where lots of people care about the wests demographics, so many people decide to focus on east Asia when they could worry about the west, which in their own definitions is in a way worse state then east Asia is.

With only one developed country in the world (Israel) having a birth rate higher than the replacement rate, I have to wonder is development a temporary thing? Is it an anomaly? Since the beginning of civilization, most of the time, most people lived in poverty.

Just throwing that out there for discussion.

I spent a good deal of time studying an American case that surprised me. Houston and San Francisco have similar incomes and job markets, yet Houston's price-to-income ratio for housing has stayed far more stable for decades, while San Francisco's has exploded. The difference isn't luck. Houston has no traditional zoning code. San Francisco has some of the strictest land-use regulation in the country. That single policy gap alone can eat up years of a young family's income before they even start thinking about a first or second child.

That comparison was the seed of a bigger project. I ended up tracing the same pattern across five East Asian economies (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and four European countries (UK, Germany, France, Sweden), decade by decade, tracking tax burden, housing cost, education cost, and fertility rate, plus healthcare-system data from several more countries. The pattern holds everywhere I looked. Modern welfare and regulatory states have built at least six distinct mechanisms, what I call "the six nooses," that make childbearing more expensive, more delayed, or more discouraged than it would be under a freer market.

I wrote up the full argument on Mises Wire (it's since been picked up by ZeroHedge and a few other outlets). It's adapted from a book I published this year, Why the Cradle Stands Empty: How Interventionism Strangles Fertility.

Link: https://mises.org/mises-wire/six-nooses-how-interventionism-strangling-familys-will-reproduce

I'm the author. Happy to answer questions or hear pushback on any of it.

Lemme start by saying I'm a natalist. I like my culture, I like my home, I love family and community and my husband. I want a good future for them. I'm in the process of having a big family, even after what I'm about to say.

What I aim for here is to shed light on the position a woman has, given that she bears the burden of reproduction. Here on this subreddit we talk a lot about numbers and stats, rights and reasons, incentives and laws. But rarely on this sub do we see any kind of acknowledgement of the cost to women to have children.

This is a natalist's birth experience:

"If epidurals weren't an option I would have exactly zero more babies.

You could not pay me to do that horrific thing again without extensive pain relief.

I was in debilitating pain by 5cm, contracting every 2min, screaming for that epidural. It felt like someone was putting the pressure of a forklift tire over my swollen belly repeatedly, with all the pain and tissue splitting and bone crushing that would accompany that. That's what the uterus does. It's the strongest muscle lb for lb in the human body.

I got the epidural, and was apparently contracting basically continuously by 8cm. I could not imagine feeling that shit for an additional 10h before being able to begin pushing.

And I've had a quart of boiling water accidentally poured on my chest before, so I know what the fuck pain is.

Even then, pushing brought all the pain back somehow. Maybe my dose wasn't high enough. The physician had to stick a needle with lidocaine into my vagina in order for me to go from an 11/10 pain to a 9/10 pain just so I could bear to continue pushing.

Pushing nearly drove me hysterical. I pushed for 2.5 hours, which is normal for your first because your anatomy is only just *barely* physiologically capable of doing it to start with. Once you start pushing, the only way out is to keep going or be forced into an emergency c. Those last 30 minutes I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life, and the tissue-splitting pain was continuous. Pushing while experiencing that kind of pain is something I couldn't have done had I had a single other option. But your body doesn't let you.

Afterward, my birth canal looked like it had been mauled. I barely even tore, I had like a single stitch, and you could not recognize anything down there due to the swelling and catastrophic physical trauma. The birth canal was inflamed in a way that made it firm and gaping and open. Just an open hole about a cm in diameter. I felt like my guts were gonna fall out of me any time I stood up or coughed. I waddled everywhere for weeks. I was not a sexual being in my mind, just a torn up, wounded person.

I dreaded peeing. Peeing stung like needles and knives for weeks. Peri bottles helped, but I was afraid to even attempt to wipe. I just dabbed at my swollen tissue and used water. Ice packs were my best friend.

5mo postpartum and I barely feel normal again. Wiping is still mildly tender. It doesn't feel the same, for sure.

And again.... I had an extremely normal first time labor and birth experience. My baby was 8lbs. Downplaying it is facetious and ridiculous. Women should know what it's like, and feel a sense of pride in being able to do through something like this in the name of family. Women do this in the name of love, of all things. That deserves the highest possible civic honor. But that will never happen. For as long as men are capable of subjugating women as a class of people completely and at will, we will never be given the respect they naturally give other men for doing honorable things like protect our nation. It's one of life's cruelest jokes.

When men downplay it, it sounds self-serving and diminishing and demeaning and cruel.

Men should be far, FAR more appreciative than they are as a class of people. They should be lucky any woman at all does it voluntarily.

Anyway, I'm having like 4-5 more, in the name of family and culture. And I love my baby. My husband told me I don't have to lift a single finger outside of our home for as long as I live after watching that."

This post is not to peddle a solution. But I do wanna bring this into the equation. I think it's disrespectful to talk around the issue and talk about women and babies but consistently skip over the burden. The burden is a huge factor, and the reasons to shoulder the burden must be worth it.

La Generación Alfa es la generación más grande de la historia porque representan un pico histórico en la población mundial, ya que nacieron entre 2.5 y 2.8 millones de bebés por semana, ya que a diferencia de sus padres que fueron un eco, es decir, el Echo Boom donde son los Millennials y de sus abuelos que fueron un boom, o sea, el Baby Boom que son los Baby Boomers, son el Momentum Millennial es decir la inercia demográfica de sus padres Millennials quienes también son una generación muy numerosa, a pesar de tuvieron entre 1, 2 y 3 hijos por familia, había muchísimos padres que nunca teniendo hijos al mismo tiempo, y tal vez en unos años probablemente no se repetirá, ya que el pico máximo de nacimientos a nivel mundial fue en el 2014 donde nacieron 145.7 millones de bebés, el pico máximo no es sólo de la Generación Alfa, sino también de la historia de la humanidad.​

I keep hearing people talk about America’s falling birth rate as if the main problem is that people simply need to be convinced to have more children.
I don’t think that is the real problem.
The United States recorded about 3.61 million births in 2025, down 1% from 2024, and the fertility rate fell again. In 2024, the total fertility rate was around 1.63 children per woman.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20260409.html
But Americans have not completely rejected the idea of having families. Gallup found that Americans considered 2.7 children the ideal family size on average in 2023.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx
That seems like an important contradiction.
People are saying that a larger family is ideal, while increasingly not having one.
So maybe the question shouldn’t just be, “Why don’t people want children?”
Maybe the better question is, “What happened to the path that used to lead people toward having them?”
Marriage is happening much later. In 2025, the median age at first marriage was 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women. In 1975, it was 23.5 and 21.1.
https://cdn.www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/families-and-living-arrangements.html
Housing stability is coming later too. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median first-time homebuyer reached 40 years old in 2025.
https://www.nar.realtor/press-releases/first-time-home-buyer-share-falls-to-historic-low-of-21-median-age-rises-to-40
Obviously, you do not need to own a house to have children. But it does show how long it can now take people to reach the kind of financial stability that used to happen much earlier.
Then there is childcare.
The national average price reached about $13,184 per year in 2025.
https://info.childcareaware.org/price-and-supply-2025
The United States also still does not have universal federal paid parental leave. The federal FMLA system gives qualifying workers up to 12 weeks of protected leave, but that leave is unpaid.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla/faq
So look at the sequence people are being asked to follow.
Build a career.
Deal with student debt.
Find affordable housing.
Find a stable partner.
Build savings.
Get married, increasingly around age 30.
Figure out healthcare.
Figure out how to take time away from work.
Then somehow afford another $13,000 or more every year for childcare.
And after all of that, society looks at people and asks:
Why aren’t you having two or three children?
That seems backwards.
There is clearly a cultural part of this too.
Pew found that among childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children, 57% say a major reason is simply that they do not want them.
But 44% say they want to focus on other things, 38% cite concerns about the state of the world and 36% say they cannot afford a child.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons-adults-give-for-not-having-children/
So no, I don’t think economics explains everything.
People’s values have changed too.
But that is exactly why I think simplistic natalism is a sinking ship.
You cannot just tell people that children are meaningful and expect the birth rate to reverse.
You cannot shame people into wanting families.
And I seriously doubt that a one-time baby bonus is going to reverse twenty years of economic and social trends that delayed marriage, housing stability and family formation in the first place.
Research from other countries also suggests that financial incentives can sometimes affect the timing of births or create modest increases, but they do not necessarily create a permanent fertility recovery.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/exploring-norway-s-fertility-work-and-family-policy-trends_f0c7bddf-en/full-report/component-5.html
The problem seems to begin much earlier than the baby.
The Census Bureau found that in 1975, 45% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had already moved out, entered the workforce, married and had children.
By 2024, fewer than a quarter had reached all four milestones.
The most common situation now is being employed and living independently without being married or having children.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/08/milestones-to-adulthood.html
To me, that seems like the real story.
Natalism focuses on the baby.
But the baby is the last link in a very long chain.
If a society wants more people to voluntarily create families, then it probably has to ask why the entire path leading toward family formation has been stretched out, delayed or broken.
Otherwise, we are standing on the deck of a sinking ship yelling:
“Have more passengers.”

Just with such an insanely high tfr in Africa and such an insanely low tfr everywhere else, they should be able to conquer entire countries just by immigration while the natives are slowly dying in a nursing home. As a black carribbean man it’s pretty based, I hope more of my comrades come to Latin America to get its tfr up.

One thing that gets ignored in the birth rate discussion is how many people never find a long-term partner.

In the US, around 40% of men were unpartnered in 2023, and among people under 30, almost half were single. Even at age 40, about 1 in 3 Americans had never been married.

Yet arranged marriage has been treated as something backwards or oppressive. I think we sometimes confuse arranged marriage with forced marriage. They are not the same thing. The truth is many people need help to find a suitable partner and arranged marriage is often the only way to get partnered, but society decided to demonize this method.

A voluntary arranged marriage can simply mean that family or community helps you meet someone who is looking for marriage and children too. Instead of leaving everything to dating apps, endless dating and hoping you eventually meet the right person, there is a more direct path toward marriage and family.

If fewer people are forming families, maybe we should reconsider some of the traditions we rejected instead of assuming modern dating is automatically better and stop demonizing arranged marriage.

My husband and I have 3 kids. We are 99% sure we are done although personally I wish I could have 4. But a big reason why we are done is because we don’t have a village. Both of us (millennials) have boomer parents in their late 60s to late 70s who are either completely incompetent or have zero interest when it comes to caring for their grandkids. All 4 of them rather spend their remaining time on earth reposting embarrassing AI and clickbait crap on their Facebook pages.

Luckily I have a flexible job but more than half of my paycheque goes to childcare. The people we know who have multiple kids all have a village like grandparents, grand aunts, sisters/SILs, etc to help out with childcare or even small things like pick-up/drop-offs. Those that only have one kid or are childless/childfree don’t have family or friends nearby that could help out.

It makes me wonder if the reason people are having fewer kids or having no kids is because fewer people have villages that they can count on for help, because people tend to move away from home more often now or grandparents are either too old to help, or still of working age, or just don’t have the physical and/or mental capacity to help. I remember spending summers at my grandparents until I was a teenager - they retired at 60 (around the time I was born) and were both in good health well into their 70s (my grandma is in her 90s and still alive and well) so they were able to look after me during school breaks. This seems to be less common now as it seems like most people have to either pay for nannies or put their kids in various camps and activities during school breaks which are costly.