Late stage capitalism.
Having kids is really expensive and insane amount of responsibility. Childcare is a full time job - so you need to go one worker per family, or be able to afford paying for it.And it also becomes recursive I think.
People want to be good parents. But in late stage capitalism, that means setting your children up to succeed in that environment. If people struggle to set themselves up as parents, they can’t have faith that they’ll be able to set their children up such that there’s just no point. Especially if you start thinking about the future and whether your grandkids could even be ok.
As someone living in the USA going into my late 30s still without kids, you nailed it. We’ve been married for 10 years. In a different world, we might have had a kid at some point in the last 5, but between covid and climate change and the second Trump term and the general sense that everything is about to implode, it doesn’t really make us feel inspired to try.
To be clear, at the moment we have everything we would need to be parents if we wanted to. But the prospect of subjecting a kid to young adulthood in the 2040s seems brutal. We’re what I would consider “nudge-able” into having a kid or two, but the world keeps giving us nothing but nudges in the direction of choosing to be childfree for life.
Random example from this year: we keep getting barraged with news slop about how our jobs are about to all be replaced by LLMs or the economy is about to collapse under the weight of the LLM bubble. Not particularly reassuring. I realize there’s no perfect time to have kids and tons of people make it work, but as a couple who have always been in the “maybe” camp, inaction feels like the only thing a logical person would choose, year after year after year.
We don’t have many years left where it’s actually viable, and frankly I can’t imagine it’s going to change.
This is what happened to my wife and me. We kept waiting and delaying because shit sucked and now… we can’t. Nature made the decision for us, much to the dismay of my parents but to the joy of my bank account.
I’m sorry, but every human being from every generation has suffered from fear for their children. The future is always unknown. There’s always been a looming future doom. The future of the climate is unprecedented, but so was the advent of the nuclear bomb. So was the advent of the trebuchet. So was the advent of steel.
The only certainty about the future is uncertainty. While absolutely terrifying, my view on it was even though it’s scary, I’ll give it a shot.
I do fear for my children’s future, but so has every human who ever had children. I enjoy the here and now and carry the hope that masses truly care for each other and always will.
Historically that hope doesn’t bear out but good for you, if not for your children.
You’re here. Is that not enough hope?
No, that’s fuckin dumb.
That’s a good point, I guess.
Why are you so upset all of a sudden? Are you ok?
Adding to that thought, you used to also have grandparents and elder family members who had the time and inclination to help out. This was especially true for those of us who were born to boomers. But now those people of that same age are having to work as things like greeters at Walmart just to be able to pay their own bills. So they don’t have the leisure time anymore to assist with raising grandchildren.
Or they just dont care and have conpletely different values. My parents arent even half the grandparents that their parents were.
We are living through the collapse of capitalism. Countries will fall I to 1 of 2 categories in response.
- Socialist
- Fascist
Given most countries are lead by the hyper rich, expect to see most being forcibly directed to #2
Only get pregnant if you can afford it.
OK
No, not like that
The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they’ll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then
This, 1000%. Every study I’ve looked at states the current economy makes having children more of a drain than a gain.
Countries can’t have children, they’re not alive.
Late stage capitalism.
When it is already hard to save up and buy a house before it’s too late for you and your partner to be capable of conceiving, is it any surprise?
I know plenty of people who would have a kid but don’t because they simply can’t afford to
My take is “How can I afford to have a kid when I can’t even take care of myself?”.
Other activities outcompete children.
The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they’d rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.
That’s for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don’t scale as well as they used to.
We’re like pandas in captivity. We’ll fuck if the conditions are right. They haven’t been right in a loooooong time. A little bit of enrichment in our enclosures would help tremendously.
capitalism
The main reason, that for some reason no one talked about yet, is that we developed and have effective and cheap contraceptives.
All other concerns are almost irrelevant. The truth is that we are very driven by immediate desires, and the “later” problem of having children goes out of the window when you’re horny and have the opportunity to have sex. If there’s no access to contraceptives, the choice between having sex and having children, or not having sex and no children, is almost always won by “having sex”.
But if you can have access to contraceptives, you do not have to chose between sex and no sex anymore. The reality is just that children have always been more inconvenient than not. I’m sure if at any point in history (or even in a perfectly utopian society) if contraceptives were developed and made available, and weren’t before, the same thing would happen.
You can only raise kids properly if you can afford it.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but poor people never being able to have children would certainly be… Problematic. My forefathers were by no means well off, but having children was (and in many countries still is) seen as way to ensure your own health and safety as you grow older. Sadly, our society is no longer designed for families to thrive. Instead we work for others so we can pay people to look after our loved ones. It’s pretty fucked up when you think about it.
I, too, think all people should be able to raise kids. That society makes it practically impossible is the problem.
You might call me old-fashioned, but being able to have one person at home to care for the kids and actually raise them is something that I consider a cornerstone.
Why put kids in the world, just to have to provide for them and have other people raise them, because you cannot afford to do this yourself?
It’s one of the great scams that industry pulled off - deriding staying home with a family as somehow failing and getting both parents out to the grind. Then selling it as progressive. I’m in favour of equal opportunity in the workplace, but we’ve been left with the worst of both worlds.
Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.
People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.
Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?
Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.
i personally am afraid that my child would live through a terrible future. also: i just dont feel like it. so maybe the existential anciety is more subconcious? idk
Everything is so god damn expensive. And it gets worse every single day.
Don’t worry though, no country is really worried about it yet because if they were they would work on making things not so obscenely fucking ridiculously expensive. (Although knowing rich bastards they’d probably just let humanity die out before they lost 5¢ on every sale)
Or at least give some sort if credit to you to lift the burden a bit. I think maybe South Korea is doing this and some Nordic countries and even China too I believe.
But still, if you have to get the calculator out and figure out how many meals you need to skip this month to be able to pay your bills I think having sex is the last thing on your mind.
Shit, most people probably ran their mates off already from the insane, soul crushing, non stop fucking stress that being able to never get ahead in your entire life brings. Bonus points if you already had a child with them, now you get to have 25% if your income stolen from you for the next 18 years (25 if they go to college) even if you see them more than they do in a lot of instances. That will sure get you in the mood.
And if not its still hard to want to fuck when you’re hungry or when you’re constantly about to lose it all and barely hanging on by a thread and obsessing about that reality in your head every single second of every single day.
TLDR: shit is too god damn expensive and it just keeps getting worse with absolutely no end in sight.
Cost of living
