Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/health/fertility-births-vance.html?unlocked_article_code=1._k0.UyEg.diFmK30F8wMc&smid=re-share

by coolbern

42 comments

  2. climate change, cost, freedom in that order

    there’s little uncle Sam can do about it, the BAU dudes will have to suck it up

  3. Child care, housing, and health insurance are all very expensive in America. When I was a public school teacher in Florida, half of my take-home pay went towards paying for my two children’s preschool.

    If you want people to have more kids, fix those issues.

  4. I mean if a child is going to absolutely ruin your life at 21 how is it not at 23?

    There is absolutely an expectation that you get to have kids when literally nothing will change about your life whatsoever ever. Which was never true 

  5. Alabama, West Virginia, Missouri and Georgia are considering bills this year that would eliminate work permit requirements for minors, verifying age or parental or school permission to work. Most states require these permits. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed a similar bill into law last year – gougle.  

     It’s this bullshit, among the cost. 

  7. Millennials growing up with internet access became more educated about sex and the costs of raising children. This has helped them avoid teen pregnancies and early marriages, unlike previous generations. Many young adults have prioritized financial stability before having kids, recognizing that raising a child can be a huge burden both financially and physically. Even those who want children often delay because they don’t want to struggle.

    High living costs, student loan debt, and job market uncertainty also contribute to hesitancy about starting families. Some have realized the financial benefits and freedom of being childless, choosing to focus on fulfilling their own lives before considering others. For society to encourage more people to have children, it needs to make parenthood more affordable. This could include better parental leave, subsidized childcare, and more accessible healthcare. By reducing the financial burden, having children could become a more realistic option for many.

  8. This is a worldwide issue not American specific. Because of the Industrial Revolution eliminating huge swaths of manual labor tasks that humans had to do, kids have went from low cost/free labor to only a financial expense. Population decline is actually more extreme in other areas of the world than the US. We are mitigating some of the problems that arise due to population decline through immigration.

  9. THEY COST TOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol

  12. Some young people have told me it’s fear of the effects of climate change.

  15. We’d be making a choice literally between being 2 full-time working parents or trying to support a family on one salary. I saw my parents struggle to keep up and had to rely on my grandparents for a period, its not something me or my partner want in our lives.

  17. >Many Americans in their teens and 20s still report that they want two children, said Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. The fact that many of those adults don’t realize those goals probably means that external factors are making it more difficult to be a parent, she said.

    >Survey data suggests that many young adults want to hit certain economic milestones before having children — they might want to buy a house, pay off student debt or comfortably afford child care…

    >…Reaching those milestones has become increasingly difficult

    We blazed through our frontier. Now we live in a constrained world. Making the most of it for us all will require more of a vision about the future than anybody is willing to offer today. Republicans are in bizarre denial of reality. But Democrats only focus on immediate barriers such as child care availability. However, the problem is deeper.

    We need to develop a roadmap for building a sustainable economy which has opportunities and jobs for everyone. That will require policies so that those who lose out in the transition quickly find new opportunities. No one should be penalized for working in an obsolete or non-competitive job.

    People looking to start a work life should feel secure that there’s a place for them.

    Given what needs to get done, there should be more jobs than we have people to do the work. With a secure job ahead, and some help paying the upfront cost of childrearing, we stand a chance of building a family friendly world. But only if we fight for it. It won’t happen by itself.

  22. Trickle down doesn’t work and is a scam.

    Source: 45 years of data

  24. It’s the world of suffering. Why in the world would I volunteerly bring kids into a world like this?

  25. I feel bad for people who can’t afford them and want to have kids. Must be horrible but I completely understand that it’s because most people are not fortunate enough to make a lot of money. Not sure why these articles are being written over and over again as if we don’t know the real reason.

  26. Let me guess, because we all broke? 🤷. How did I do?

  27. I have two grown children. While it was tough at first you get the hang of it and manage your money better. But nowadays I wouldn’t have children. I could not afford them. Better you enjoy your as a single person. Getting married can be okay but having children would be expensive.

  29. My wife and I make a combined 200k a year. We’re able to own a home in a nice area around a big city and live comfortably without a strict budget while easily saving for retirement. If we had kids that previous sentence would have a hard stop after “home”

  31. Lack of a living wage, narcissism and arrested development.

  34. Why would I want to bring someone I loved unconditionally into this F’d up world? I’d be a great dad, and I am a great uncle, but I can’t get my head around this ridiculous world we currently live in, and who knows what tomorrow will bring? WW3? Another pandemic? Not worth the heartache, tbh

  35. There’s a lot of factors at play here. What it comes down to is a very personal decision, but I’m sure any combination of these serve as powerful influences. I want to lead this by saying I have friends who want kids and I make the conscious choice to respect their decision on the matter. I believe it is not my place to judge what anyone else does with their lives.

    Kids are expensive, and raising them to the age of 17 costs to the tune of $233k in 2015’s dollars. That’s slightly less than the average retirement savings for Americans 65+. And we’re talking about a country where more than a third of the country can’t afford basic needs and three quarters would struggle to afford an unexpected $500 expense. And this is not to mention record levels of consumer debt, and a cost of living that has far outpaced wage growth.

    This isn’t the 1950s or 60s anymore where a single income could afford you a modest house, kids, and a retirement, and you’re sure as hell not pulling that off nowadays unless you are dual-income and making far more than the median household income (74k). About 2/3 of the country make below 100k annually, and of that group half make less than 75k.

    Then there’s the polycrisis of climate change, and the fact we’re speed running into uncharted waters seemingly without any hesitation or care in the world. We have no historical precedent for this at a time when we’ve numbered 8 billion people. Projections for literal existential catastrophes have been moved up time and time again. We’ve already exceeded 2°C of warming as of about 2023 and feedback loops are a real thing. We’re talking about anoxic oceans that can’t support life, drastic sea level rise, extreme worsening of climate events in both intensity and frequency, widespread famines and a planet that won’t support agriculture at the scale we need to sustain this civilization.

    There’s the unavoidable question of resource use. Fossil fuels are (unfortunately) the lifeblood that keeps the heart of modern civilization ticking, and not just for transportation but for electricity generation, agriculture, and hundreds of other things. Did you know it takes seven gallons of oil to make a single tire?

    By most conventional estimates, at current consumption rates, we are set to exhaust our proven reserves of natural gas and petroleum by about 2060. That’s only 36 years from now. This isn’t the 19th century where oil was gushing up under our feet. Like an addict scraping the resin off their bowl, we’re engaging in increasingly resource intensive methods for extraction – shale and tar sand refinement, deep sea drilling; after a while the net energy return on energy investment will pass a point where we’re consuming more energy to even extract the stuff than we’re getting out of it. Some argue we already have, and that the fact we’ve even grown to such a scale is because the net energy of that equation allowed us to. Question is, what happens when it doesn’t anymore? What happens to the 1.4 billion cars on the road, the 28,000 planes, the 118,000 ships? What happens to all the commerce and logistics and agriculture they make possible when the oil goes away? And what happens when nuclear armed nations are pushed to the brink to keep our fossil-fuel intensive ways of life going and there isn’t much of the stuff left? And renewables aren’t the answer – even if somehow we could miraculously retool our way of life around them, demand for rare earth metals crucial to their manufacture and maintenance have risen 10% year over year historically, and at that rate we’d have used them all up as well by about 2150.

    And this isn’t even touching on the political or cultural storms occurring right now.

    I think about these things and how difficult life already is for so many people, and facing down the barrel at a life that is almost certain to become more difficult, terrifying and uncertain, and I can say personally my first thought is not “let me subject someone who doesn’t yet exist to living through an even more horrifying and brutal existence than I ever experienced”. Anyone born today will be 36 around the time we’re slated to run out of fossil fuels, still a full life ahead of them in any other world. But with all these factors combined, they’d have been lucky to make it even to that age, let alone live and longer.

    And the thing is, it doesn’t matter how “successful” you are right now. No matter how good of a parent you might be, or how much money you have, how strong of a community you’re a part of – almost nothing you can do personally can or will protect that yet to be born person from what’s coming.

    I think that’s the scariest part of it. And most people even deciding they don’t want kids might not even be engaging it beyond the fact that they can’t even afford to live themselves right now. But these factors are there and they’re real, as much as we may want to pretend they’re not.

    All said, it’s a heavy decision to make and one that should not be made lightly. The least we could do is respect each other’s decisions on the matter. Regardless of what is to come, I wish for a world in which all would be welcomed, accepted and loved. But I don’t think that’s our world.

  37. Work too much for so little money so can’t afford it, plus like someone else said more free time

  38. Why raise people who will only live long enough to be enlisted into the water wars. Plus, what kind of country are we giving them?

    “Don’t worry you can always grow up to he a slut, a slave, or an incel.”

    Unless your part of that 10% of the population that is lucky enough to have other options.

    And then when they have kids, they can tell all your grandchildren about what it was like to see and smell amd hear a live elephant or whale, polar bear, or Amazon forest, coral reaf, song birds…..

    Plus, the USA is quickly becoming a third world power. It’s like watching a monkey with a gun. The rest of the world will not tolerate this county for long

    Long story short. Shit time to be having kids. Fuck there’s plastic in all the water.

  39. I’m 37; it Took me til 36 to finish my PhD and start pulling down a big boi salary. Between student loan repayments and trying to enjoy myself / make up for years lost to the pursuit of education, I just don’t see kids in my near future, if at all.

  40. Having kids seems boring and hard. I would rather spend my time doing interesting things and enjoying the world how I want to rather than spend it changing diapers, singing the wheels on the bus go round and round, and eating McDonald’s in the play area. I have 1 life to live and the first part of it I had to spend doing kid stuff because I was a kid. I’m now an adult and want to do adult stuff, like from now on.

  42. Forgive my student I have been trying to pay off for years and I’ll think more about having one or two assuming my partner agrees. Until then the world can get bent. fix housing, healthcare and fundamental issues in the US that half of the world has and this is a moot point.

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