Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though.
There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the climate factor, both in terms of actual climate and "living climate" (as in, the world we live in and the conditions we get to live in).
A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime.
Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
Car seats and public schools going to shit definitely didn’t help. And the two working parents. Tough times
My opinion is:
There are advantages and disadvantages of the reduced human population; I think the advantages are more significant.
At this time, human population is too much and should be reduced, so anyone who does not want to have children should not have children (this is the good way to do it, voluntary, rather than being forced or "expected" to do one way or other way). Humans is not the only living things in this world. What is not enough population at this time is insects.
"school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. Private, paid schools cover 1-20% of kids depending on the country. But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all.
> "Calling this a crisis, saying it's real. That's a shift I think," says demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe
What's the crisis?
Quasi related, I thought immediately of this experiment.
It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head.
Isn't this good news for the environment?
I don't see how I can view this any other way than the culminating results of rampant capitalism. When everything is reduced to pure profit motives there is no room left for people to be people. Time off, dating, family, stability, and more, all take a back seat to increasing profits. And as business and corporations get bigger and bigger they only gained more power and control over peoples lives and push us farther down the self-destructive path of pure profit motivations and working endless hours.
if it’s not the social issues, it’ll be the microplastics
It's OK, it had to happen at some point
Aside: I hang out in 'Pro Natalism' social media every once in a while.
It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result.
The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls.
Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight.
They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists.
I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it.
But still, an interesting place while it's here.
I've always wondered, what fraction of the decline could be attributed to indoor pet dogs?
Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero.
This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog.
Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.
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There's a single reason that's highly correlated better by a long shot and obviously causal. What's curious is that it's so tremendously controversial. But since this subject is so contentious we're looking at pets, carseats and other regulation, porn/sextoys and microplastics?
The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society.
There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.
200 years ago you would have ten children, a few would survive until adulthood, and you needed to have children or nobody would look after you in old age, help you out when they're grown or take over your farm when you became infirm - and besides, everyone else has children, so if you don't you're the odd one out.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.