Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
It’s crazy this was downvoted. This is basically a summary of all pew research on this topic - lol.