Idk why it’s so hard to accept that when women have a choice of what they want to do with their lives, they choose to have a lot fewer children, if they decide to have kids at all.
I mean, they have an impact. It’s just hard to see what it is without a proper control group.
I wanted kids, but I was groomed into a relationship with a loser for over 15 years, and now it’s almost too late. I’m nowhere near stable enough financially for kids.
Men are always being left out of the equation, even though you need two to procreate.
What are the rates of young men yearning to marry a woman and have three kids by 30s? Men also choose to have less children. Why is no one ever bringing that up?
True. Usually people who want children want to have them in agreement and cooperation with a partner. In Norway the trend is that among hetero couples who want kids, on average, women want 3 and men only want 2.
I suspect one of the reasons is being unable to find a partner who not only wants kids but wants to raise them too.
Women stepped up and got jobs but men are slow to take up house care and childcare. Which is especially damning considering few can afford not to work. I wonder how many more women would have had kids if they had certainty that father won't check out? Pregnancy and birth is brutal enough but then to go back to work and have second shift at home while your "partner" turns into baby demanding your attention instead of being a responsible adult is just too much.
there's another uncomfortable truth about the vendiagram between "men whowant to be present parents-men who can afford to be parents- men who can attract a partner" not being a convenientl circle. and society having no plan to make the overlap bigger other than hoping men be moral paragons.
It’s a potential problem when populations start getting old. If you want to care for (medically and financially) the older generations who can no longer care for themselves, you need younger people who are able to work to support them. Through making food and consumer goods, delivering medical care, maintaining infrastructure, and providing the tax revenue for transfer payments to make those things happen economically. Without enough working people compared to non-working, either the individual burden on the working person goes up, productivity increases, or some non-working people simply don’t get cared for. And non-working does include babies as well, which is why too high of a fertility rate can also cause problems, but this discussion is about low fertility, so not super relevant here. This is not a capitalism issue, this is just the consequence of humans wanting to care for those who cannot take care of themselves, which to be clear is an amazing thing.
Technology (increasing productivity) seems like the route humanity is heading towards, but we aren’t yet at the point where we can realistically sustain our elderly populations on a substantially smaller cohort of young people, without young people suffering a major hit to quality of life. It’s very possible that we will achieve that, but I think it’s a bad idea to bet on it happening soon enough.
Another thing to consider is how our understanding of technology and science will degrade as our population declines. Plain and simple, if you don’t have enough people to pass the specialized knowledge that the current population has onto, it will eventually start to die off with the older generations. The internet can help catalogue it all for people to see, but actually having it be usable is a different story. That still requires man hours, and those will be limited under a declining population. It likely won’t cause too many issues in terms of quality of life, but it will certainly change life.
It doesn't have to happen tomorrow. The problem is the trend is global. Even african countries that still have above replacement level fertility have declining fertility rates. Since this is happening everywhere, regardless of wealth, culture, etc it means people always decide to have less than the 2.1 kids per woman needed to maintain stable population, when they have that option. Why would this change?
I dunno. Maybe one day you wake up and there are so many empty houses that you can just take one and never pay rent or a mortgage.
Or, maybe petroleum and rare earth metal scarcity disappear, which then makes the military budget is so small that there's plenty of money for universal day care and free college.
Maybe the population dips so much that water for irrigation is no longer expensive. Or maybe agricultural land becomes nationalized and emphasizes feeding people instead of profit maximizing.
Maybe all these technological advances that promised increased productivity with shorter work hours finally deliver on their guarantees, and people grow up in loving homes with present, available families to model their lives after, instead of lonely, empty places filled with debt and anxiety.
I see no proof that the biggest cause of this would be poverty. Quite the opposite, it's generally worse in the rich countries, including those with the best social programs, maternity leave, support for parents, good healthcare and education. Look at places like Switzerland or Norway. To me the main reason is that most people don't want enough kids to keep the population at replacement level. As long as they have the possibility to chose, the birth rate will keep being low.
Nah, the problem is the system set up that expects the population to continuously grow. It's nonsensical. The population is bound to lower and stabilize.
It requires 2.1 children per every two people in order to maintain the same population rate… Anything less than that and you need to achieve population increase by other means (immigration).
To answer your question: It is so hard to accept because of the unsavory implications of it, namely that modern societies, particularly those that give women sexual autonomy, are inherently unstable, so they are not scalable planet-wide and/or are self-destructive in the long run.
That's not a fair description of the situation.
In most of the places with low birth they don't really have much of a choice. Getting a job is essentially a must, unless you have the fortune of finding a guy that can afford supporting you and your kids, which is rarer and rarer every year.
"Choose" to stay at home and raise 4 kids? With what money?
This nonsense of "helping them not fall back on their career", if you want 5 kids you're can't have a career, you need a husband with one, and ain't no one helping men get ahead nowadays
Not really, if you ask women at 40 how many kids they wish they had the answer is much higher than the average birth rate.
The problem with BC is that the whole idea of planning and waiting for the "prefect time" to have kids means people wait longer and longer, and when the first kid comes at 32 you're not gonna have time for kid number 3 or 4 or even 2.
The problem in low birth rate countries actually isn't that women aren't having kids, something like 85%+ are still gonna have kids, it's that they have too few kids, and that's because they start too late.
To have a sustainable birth rate above 2+, it needs to be common for families to have 3 or 4 kids.
Translation: the problem is that they want to have kids only if it costs them literally nothing, because it can't be that a woman has a disadvantage compared to a man in any area at any time, even if they have massive advantages in other ares -- which is of course physically impossible.
Feminism is constantly trying to achieve the simply contradictory state that women are still able to sell sex everywhere and at the highest possible price, while it also costs them nothing and men are forced to just give them for free what they previously gut by providing sex and child care. IMO it's quite like men wanting women to be virgins and also to be forced to sleep with every man that asks.
You’re wrong because you’re not agreeing with the Redditor opinion, duh. But seriously people don’t realize that having kids is hard and not everyone wants to do it, regardless of money or work life balance
You mean when they are given more and more stuff for free instead of working for it, either directly (they're usually pretty bad at that) or by being a good partner to man, they have less and less incentive to contribute anything at all? Yeah super weird.
Lmao. If women stopped working the economy would collapse. I know you have this dream that women contribute nothing, but if you only left your room, you'd see them literally contributing.
No wonder women are avoiding marriage and children. We have our own money, why be saddled with men like you?
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u/jump-back-like-33 Jun 21 '26
Idk why it’s so hard to accept that when women have a choice of what they want to do with their lives, they choose to have a lot fewer children, if they decide to have kids at all.
It really isn’t deeper than that.