Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It's just been smoke and mirrors.
I decided not to have kids after listening to literally everyone who had kids describe their experiences and not assuming they were weak, stupid or lying.
even if my own experiences as a child didn't put me off forcing someone else to exist, hearing parents talk makes it completely baffling why anyone with a choice would choose to do that to themselves.
You literally cannot imagine the doses of oxytocin and dopamine when your kid looks you in the eyes and smiles for the first time. All the wonderful moments are like a goddamn fix.
It’s literally the only reason (most) parents don’t murder their kids when they’re being shitty little assholes.
But seriously, you simply don’t realize how heady a hit of emotional bonding-feel good cocktail it is until it happens to you.
And this is coming from someone who spent half the 90s candy flipping.
It's utterly exhausting and absolutely not something anyone should do without a support network, but it's also the single most rewarding experience in my life. Nothing comes close. Making my child laugh for the first time was better than any drug I've ever done. But unless you're in a good place mentally, socially, financially, don't.
Oh, I don't know. I love having kids. It can be a lot, but nothing really touches the feeling of when you come home from work and they all rush to see you. I could see it not being for everyone, though.
There are valid reasons in the comments here, but a lot of people I talk to genuinely are interested in being parents, but don't have the funds to even provide for themselves. It's entirely about the money. Give people money and they will have kids. It isn't hard.
I didn't mean this in a transactional sense. I agree you cannot pay people to have kids and I agree that, with reproductive freedom and personal autonomy as an option, many fewer afab people will have kids than the historical average.
My observation is that it isn't uncommon for single people and couples capable of becoming pregnant to express a desire to have children, but have reservations that are purely financial.
The answer is you can't pay people to have 3 kids, but you can pay people who already want to have a single kid to have a kid.
People don't talk enough about how having children is a privilege that the rich enjoy. Yes, you can have kids and be poor (and many do, no hate to our parent comrades), but it costs so much money to have children and if you do it whilst being poor you have to sacrifice so much that would be absolutely nothing to a rich family.
And then rich parents do shit like end pandemic protections because they're sick of their kids being at home all the time
Anyone else remember how "having kids you can't afford" was apparently the root of all social ills for several decades?
I remember that all over the TV.
"Oh you can't afford it" " oh you don't have time between your 2 jobs" "Oh you don't have a a big enough space" " then don't have kids"x3 So all of us growing said yeah legit Now they all surprise pikachu face.
good, fewer first worlders is probably the best thing possible for the climate
Yep, that's my reasoning. Sure, the idea of an individual carbon footprint is almost entirely propaganda to keep people from executing fossil fuel executives in the streets, but increasing your emissions by ~50% per kid seems like a big enough difference to matter.
That and not wanting to bring a child into a country that is on a perpetual slope towards ever-greater fascism.
Honestly first-worlders who gripe about carbon footprints being bullshit can be easily dismissed as idiots who don't grasp the scale of the problem. Their personal lifestyle will have to change massively. A single cross-country flight emits more carbon than citizens of some poor countries emit in an entire year.
I want kids. Badly. However, I'm sterile. The state itself will also never let me adopt children. On top of that, my family could never afford it. Like, what the fuck else do you want from me, Elon?
I'm a polyamorous transbian that has 2 wives. You couldn't find anyone in the state that would dare allow me to adopt a child.
Besides being gay myself, I saw what was coming growing up and thought it would be especially cruel to raise someone in a doomed world and decreasing quality of life. I never had any desire of have kids.
I decided against having children because of the fear of bringing more children into a world that's progressively growing more unstable due to climate change.
This. It's becoming more and more impossible to live a decent life even within the imperial core and nothing points to that changing anytime ever, so having children seems like a pretty damn selfish and/or idiotic idea.
It's a shame too, because I like children and really think there should be more inter-generational contact between people in different stages of their lives.
Also even if society wasn't falling off a fucking cliff within the next fifty years, I wouldn't really want to have children in a fortnite/YouTube kids/tiktok world either. Just fully blasting developing brains with skinner boxes and max engagement at all times isn't fucking cool or good. Just let them watch sesame Street.
Honestly I’ve watched my brother and his wife raise a kid for 7 years and another for 2, and it’s stressed them the absolute fuck out. Totally changed them. I also only know only maybe 3 or 4 people who have a good relationship with their parents. I have a bad one with my own mom. Just seems like you could put in all this effort, stress yourself out every single day for a long time, eliminate any personal time for yourself, have no guarantee that they won’t rely on you for even longer (like my alcoholic sister at 34 still living with my mom), they will probably turn out politically opposite to you (so in my case a liberal or fascist), and not to mention how expensive it would be + by the time they’re old enough to have their own lives, the world will be even more on fire and unlivable. I just do not see the upside
it's really not catastrophic for humanity
It's already insufficient for maintaining population in half of the world and keeps falling further everywhere. Any socialist project would be forced to confront this issue or collapse in the long term. Capitalism is definitely choosing collapse.
Do we even need to maintain current population? Especially in the "half of the world" where it's declining? Not that I'm Malthusian, I think how society is organized is massively more important than its population, but a little gradual decrease in the "west" seems neutral to positive overall
Demographic collapse in the West would be a net good, because it would destroy Western military capabilities, but overall - no. Society should be able to maintain stable population. Population decline is hard to stop at 'optimal' level, and once population have declined below some level, complex economic and societal organization becomes too hard to maintain.
Also, another half of the world is going in the same direction, just several decades later. Iran, for example, has already birth rates below replacement rate. In fact, we can expect Earth's population to start declining in 10-20 years, and this decline would be accelerating.
If we manage to stabilise world population at mid 70s level, it would be a great success TBH. Birth rate decline is accelerating and majority of population would be old people, who are able to work much less and require a lot more care, so the raw labour power would be much smaller. I bet all of the West would introduce euthanasia to deal with it.
Also, capitalism is working like shit, when the population is not growing, and if it begins to decline, it will crap itself much more than now, and it will accelerate decline even more, until this positive feedback results in either communism or agrarian traditionalism, and the latter currently seems more likely.
And the other half of the world is meeting the gap.
It wouldn't for much longer, birth rates there decline too.
Under current conditions, continual population growth will lead to collapse at some point.
Yeah, but we are going to switch to population decline in 10-20 years.
For example, projecting the 1995 global fertility rate out to 2150 results in a human population of ~250 billion.
We already have smaller global fertility rate and it continues to decline. Linear extrapolation and its consequences and so on.
I think it's an issue that would be addressed by socialism regardless.
Soviet Union and other socialist countries had only partial solution. In fact, we can look at Korea with DPRK having a 1.9 fertility rate (and this is already less than replacement rate) and RoK with 0.7 fertility rate (which is a complete disaster long term, and it keeps declining).
What comments are you referring to? Most of this thread is just people saying they don't want a kids and a few blaming it on economic conditions.
population rates go down when women have more rights and education
Less pirates means more global warming, so if you are against global warming, you are supporting killing innocent sailors.
But seriously, the reason is that for subsistence farmers more kids meant more available labour and it increased their quality of life. That was the primary reason for high birth rates. For industrial/office/service workers more kids inevitably mean a lower quality of life, and increasing atomization of society and economic troubles just make this fall sharper. In fact, you can look at historical data and see that urban birth rates were always god awful (usually even lower than present-day) and it was rural areas that provided cities with people. With urbanization and replacing subsistence farming with industrial farming this source has been destroyed. The right wing can destroy women's rights, but it will not bring birth rates back. In fact, in will result in less available labour for industry and fall in the quality of life, which will result in lower birth rates.
So I actually have agree with you, people blaming it on people being "too poor" are being reductive. I do think there's economic factors at play here but I think it's more complicated than just "too poor".
I would point out, birth rates are declining in most of the world, this isn't purely a rich developed white country thing, and there are some worrying societal implications to that. And yes educated women with more rights have less kids and that's a good thing, but I do also think there is a phenomenon of women who want children but find they can't for a variety of social and economic reasons in the modern world and I think that's also a bad thing.
I would get more into this but it's early and I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts right now.
Yes, figuring out how to keep the global population sustained is eventually going to be a problem once (if, given capitalism) all developing countries fully industrialize and nowhere has a high birth rate.
Educated women work instead of having kids because two incomes is almost required at this point and having kids ruins career prospects. If it were somehow possible to have kids and maintain a job, e.g. by the spouse taking on an appropriate and equal amount of responsibility, or with free and government-funded daycare, women would probably be more likely (but not certain) to have kids. This can be seen in the 1970s in the GDR, where birth rates increased (at least temporarily) when free daycare was introduced. Also, employers need to give more vacation time all around so parents are not disproportionately taking vacation time and putting their careers at a disadvantage. This is actually, in combination with the fact that women are expected to do most of the parenting, a large contributor to the wage gap; Employers see women as a liability and pass over them for promotions and such because they believe they will have children and miss work, regardless of the truth of that for any individual.
However, this doesn't mean people will have many kids if circumstances allow, just that it would be more likely that a couple would have kids at all. As the other user mentioned, three kids is a lot.
TL;DR Economic conditions matter when having a kid only when the women are educated and required to be in the workforce but parenting is not accommodated by employers or governments (in non-financial ways). In countries where women are not expected to join the workforce, economic conditions and government policy have less influence.
Yeah, I have found myself using "too poor" as a shorthand for "no social support of any kind" which is the more general cause.
And even then, it's only a problem insofar as people are being denied choices. Overall population is only a problem for bourgeois economics, and even then it's probably not a top-5 problem.
I think if people had adequate social support and stability (in a hypothetical socialism or communism) they would tend to have kids at around the replacement rate, and if they didn't it would balance itself out over a few centuries.
it would balance itself out over a few centuries
There is a possibility that it would balance itself by returning to traditionalist agrarian society, which wouldn't be good.
IDK I could imagine some kind of solarpunk communism 300 years from now with world population that gradually stabilized at 500 million or something. Or a high-tech spacefaring star-trek communism also with 500 million. Or either of those with 20 billion population. I just think population is a relatively small factor compared to all of the rest of economic and social organization.
It is a very important factor. After all, all economic value come from labour, not to mention economy of scale and division of labour, which are more efficient with higher population. I really doubt you can get space-faring civilization with 500 million people, satellites and unmanned exploration would be its limit at best.
Also, I fear a scenario, where the world collapses back into agrarian traditionalism, because it is the only known way to sustain population and all the other societies just decline into irrelevance, and then we get another cycle of class society, until we finally manage to solve this problem.
Birth rates are declining in the developing word too, this isn't an exclusively white first world thing.
Do you have any articles or books I could look into about materialist and feminist analysis of procreation/birth rates? I know it's a pretty central subject in feminism of course, but I want to understand this specific issue a little better because I honestly did believe the idea that "give families a better environment and they'll choose to have kids" but you definitely have some good points that make me question it.
I guess my main issue is, you say we shouldn't be concerned as leftists because only white birth rates and declining. And I don't really care about white birth rates, but isn't the trend that happens with white people going to happen with PoC in the future, should systemic racism be dismantled? Why shouldn't we expect that if FALGSC came about in 100 years and there was no systemic racism, PoC would also have pretty low birth rates? Which would, at some point, become an actual problem. And not one that should ever be solved by limiting women's rights.
But just to be clear, you're right in that this is not an immediate concern. Climate change and global war are orders of magnitude more threatening, and there is no shortage of people being born at this moment.
I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash.
Job prospects have been about the same since the 08 crash: no one is hiring.
