Natural selection at work, somehow. This isn't a dig at people without kids, you do you, I just find it interesting that our brightest minds also tend to be leaves on the tree, never becoming branches. They just leave their toys for the rest to play with, kind of undermining our actual progress.
When you have to work for decades to pay off the cost of education (that the state used to heavily subsidize), much less ever afford a house, much LESS ever afford a house big enough to raise kids, is it any shock that those bright and motivated enough to be the best aren't able to spare the time any more?
Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic. I remember how the conditions were much worse when I was a kid and my parents raised me anyways. And I look at how countries getting richer leads to less kids.
I know that this is the rhetoric around why people are not having kids, but it's a pretext, it's not the real reason.
You can deny it all you want, or you can ask people why they're not having kids.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
33% say "not finding the right partner". Everything being too expensive such that we're working all the time and don't have any down time is a huge part of that. Economics play into leisure time, stress, and things that kill relationships and the desire to have sex/kids.
> Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic.
Mass Mutual, 2024: Of those surveyed who plan to remain child free, 43% cited “inability to afford children”[0].
Pew, 2024: Of those who feel it is unlikely that they will have children, 41% of people under 40 cited “can’t afford it” as a reason they are not having children, versus only 22% for those 40+[1].
Morning Consult, 2020: 41% of adults without children cite “it’s too expensive to raise children” as a reason; 24% say it is a “major reason”.[2]
BadCredit.org, 2024: 86% of adults who have delayed having children did so for financial reasons[3].
The Morning Consult survey may be particularly useful if you want to look at just one, because it has more granular age cohort breakdowns which show a clear trend for younger people not having children for financial reasons.
[0] https://www.massmutual.com/global/media/shared/doc/q3_2024_m...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
[2] https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/2806512...
[3] https://www.badcredit.org/studies/plans-to-have-children-in-...
Was there pervasive access to birth control back then?
Almost everyone on this site was conceived at a time when the knowledge and materials required for pregnancy avoidance was widely available.
What are the real reasons you think?
I initially shrugged this off as "oh, well the respondents are probably all in their 20s", but then found that under Health and... nope!
Fascinating. I wonder if there is some other confounding factor here.
- 49, leaf on a tree.