Kids? A Growing Number of Americans Say, ‘No, Thanks.’
Kids? A Growing Number of Americans Say, ‘No, Thanks.’
A new study breaks down the reasons more U.S. adults say they are unlikely to have children.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/anyBg
Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.
When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.
I really can't comprehend how someone can look at the state of things and think it is appropriate to subject another person to the rat-ass future that's coming. That's before you even consider the expense of raising children, which is also prohibitive.
77They don't "look"... Those are the ones that want kids. Those who weight the pros and cons, most likely reach the conclusion that having kids is not feasible.
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Not having kids is the only way some of them are gonna be able to afford to live, and less people 30 years from now means they might even be able to afford a place to live if they can retire.
There's always fearmongering when populations god down, but historically it's the only time periods normal people can claw back some wealth from the 0.1%
Which is why the wealthy always freak the fuck out. They do t care about people, they care about labor supply, and the more people the cheaper labor.
67Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity
The phenomenon of societies having their birth rate fall off as they become wealthier is called the demographic transition.
And further, that correlation exists across a number of axes:
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Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).
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Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).
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Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here's the US, and more-generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.
24Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children.
That’s why the very wealthy want people to keep having lots of kids. Kids make you more willing to take shit in order to feed them and make you poorer and more dependent on your job. That’s not a bad thing about kids, it’s a good thing about parents, but it also makes parents easier to exploit.
9Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.
Correlation is not causation, there's no "other way around"...
But what you're talking about is the drop in fertility due to industrialization and other periods where children worked less and cost more.
That's different than what I'm talking about; when a labor supply shrinks it means workers get paid more.
That's just basic supply and demand.
We're both right, just talking about different things.
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There is the real issue of how a society will support its aged population with significantly less young people working than in the past. It requires changes to regulations and taxation and many nations arent ready to accept that and instead somehow expect the smaller number of young people to just pick up the slack and accept they won't get to retire when they age.
11Robots for care
maybe giving people the option for an early peaceful end on thier own terms. It was disgusting watching my great grandfather be trapped in his own body for 10 years. What a horror show. Already planned my way out if it looks like im going to be the same.
Maybe even Basic income for people taking care of elderly family members.
Or better yet basic income for sahm up to 1st grade. Lol could you imagine the pop increase.
2Just die at a reasonable age.
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Is this a surprise? People can barely afford to take care of themselves these days, why would they want to further burden themselves with a child?
Stop stealing everything from the lower and middle classes and giving it all to the rich, and this trend will magically reverse itself.
56There was a podcast I listened to a while back that indicated the opposite, the idea was that the better off people are, the less likely they are to have kids. One of the explanations I remember was that the better off people are, kids are just another competing thing that they can do. For example, if you are well off and can go travel for a long period of time, you might be more inclined to do that vs deciding to have kids. Another stat was that birthrates were higher for lower income people.
3Nah this is bullshit. Most people want to raise a family in a home they own. Take away that possibility of certainty of having a roof over your head and then planning for a kid sounds scary. If you don't want to accept that, you could also blame the micro plastics floating around in everyone's balls now because plastic was considered such a useful byproduct to the petroleum industry.
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Nobody can afford kids with all of the corporate price gouging and wage theft. no shit we're not having more kids.
4240 years of a recession will do that to a society. An entire generation fucked.
40Unbounded growth isn't progress, it's a disease.
29Literally Cancer's modus operandi
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I think previous generations felt they had no choice. And even ITT those who chose to have kids are still smitten with this idea that life has no meaning without kids. Which was historically a coping mechanism for those previous generations who needed a way to deal with not having a choice.
Having kids seems awful 99.999% of the time. Life has a lot to offer without giving your entire existence over to children, despite the popular belief otherwise
17well that and having to watch the kids have a lower quality of life than you had and that includes the part you provide as well as their long term prospects.
20Right! There's no shortage of reasons not to have kids. If I felt they were easy to afford and I knew they'd turn out well, I might just be interested. But no such guarantees exist so yeah I'm not risking being stressed an insane amount for 25%+ of my life.
The behavior I see in kids alone is probably enough though. My kids would have to go to school with that? All the trauma I experienced in school as a kid? Yeah I'm not choosing that for someone else. And I'm absolutely not home schooling either. I know someone whose life was destroyed by that and other choices his parents made.
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I think previous generations felt they had no choice.
Previous Generation here, you're wrong.
Life has a lot to offer without giving your entire existence over to children
I'm also a parent and if you are giving your entire existence over to your children then you're doing it wrong. Yes being a parent means making time and energy for your children but that demand fades the older they get and even while they are young you should still be making time for yourself and your partner.
5How old are you? You're saying you had kids before birth control existed? That's obviously what I meant
Also I would consider giving hours every day mandatorily giving my life up to someone/something. Just like I feel like my job consumes my life. It does.
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Societal pressure to have children is a huge factor for sure. I've heard from previous generations in my family that during the baby boom era, rumors would circulate in their community if you didn't have enough children, like "something must be wrong with the Johnsons down the street because they only ever had two kids" (and this was in upper-middle class WASP America).
Obviously this attitude continues today in certain communities (Mormons, small rural towns, etc), but it's no longer as prevalent.
3And someone with your mindset should not have kids. So, good on you for making that choice. Previous generations knew they had a choice, but they were pressured because having a family was part of “the American Dream”.
I am an older millennial and have a child. Sure, it’s hard work and I sacrifice to give them things they need or want but I wouldn’t change it. His outlook on life, focus on being a good person, and how he views the world at 10 is all amazing. It’s these kids that see through the BS and try and be better that are our future and hope for changing things.
Plus, like it or not, they are the ones that will take care of you when you’re old and suffering and they’re the ones that kind of keep the world running when we’re too old. I guess you can always purchase a gun and off yourself though but to me, that seems horrible rather than saying goodbye and going a lot more peacefully.
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I taught my 3 year old to say 'No, thanks", and it's so cute. He's so polite and I love him so much 🥹
13I have two kids. 7 and 3. Parenting is the hardest thing you will ever do.
11To raise a child with the correct moral characteristic takes time and input from many people. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is spot on.
5Yeah and some of us are so far from families or even worst have unreliable off the rails families. Without proper support it will be a disaster.
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I'm not unaccomplished, by any means, but I genuinely felt like I wasted my life before having a kid. We had our first at 36 and we're about to start trying for a 2nd at 38.
Which is to say, while it's hard, it's one of the only things worth doing in life. IMO, obviously.
(For the record, in our 20s we were the "no thanks" crowd, I changed in my 30s and my wife took an extra 6 years to come around)
Edit: lol love the downvotes for this benign comment. Lemmy is a dumpsterfire.
0I decided at 30 to have kids. I wouldn't say I wasted my life before kids, I just wasn't ready yet. I still feel under prepared. I say that children is the hardest thing you will ever do, and I think that's the source of downvotes I'm getting. I'm not saying that there are not other things in life that are hard. If you choose not to have kids, you can still have hard things in your life.
However, if you do choose to have kids, that will be the hardest thing you do. Emotionally and physically hard. You lose any sort of regenerative sleep for 5 years. Fitness routine? Bye bye. Energy? Out the window. Oh, you enjoyed the relationship with your spouse? HAH! And then you take the emotional stuff into it, like mourning the loss of the human baby you grew to love and falling in love with the toddler the baby became. And then the cycle repeats again and again until one day they don't come back. It's a 20 year relationship that ends with a partial breakup.
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Further reasons included...not having found the right partner.
I think this reason doesn't get enough attention. I am childless, and there are a lot of complex reasons why that is, but I think I would have been much more likely to try to have kids if I had been able to find a woman I really wanted to have kids with. Of all the women I've been with, only one was someone I would want to have kids with, but she couldn't have kids.
11If I could buy a house where I live I could consider one. But that won’t be for a long time or I move and start over
7It's not only about "not being able to afford them". Plenty of people in the world "cannot afford" kids and have 7 of them.
It's the mix of being educated and understanding that it's not a great idea to have kids, plus the means of being able to prevent or stop pregnancy. Also a cultural shift that allowed us to think by ourself and not feeling forced to have kids.
But the machine need human lubricant to keep working for its owners so they are going to take that from us to ensure we keep making them workers to exploit.
We are already seeing how anti-pregnancy methods are being attacked. And soon they will take away this new culture to bring back the old hivemind culture. And of course the education. There is already a trend on how bad it is for everyone to have a college degree.
5The only thing that will convince these people is to receive the excessive money those millionaires and billionaires we have today around the world don't really deserve. I'd have children if it was easy, but fuck that. It's better to hurt the upper class by not giving them cheap hand labour anymore, and I know they don't like to hire the poorest people possible either because of a lot of henious reasons.
I am glad this is another reason for why they're getting so fucked, slowly, but fucked
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