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Kids? A Growing Number of Americans Say, ‘No, Thanks.’

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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.

givesomefucks ,

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.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.

ourworldindata.org/…/children-per-woman-fertility…

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:

  • Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).

  • Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).

  • Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here’s the US, and more-generally:

    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.

givesomefucks , (edited )

Having 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.

phcorcoran ,

I took “rather than the other way around” to mean “rather than negatively-correlated” in this context, since positively was emphasized

FireRetardant ,

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.

givesomefucks ,

Or we could just tax the wealthy…

FireRetardant ,

Yes, i mentioned it requires changes to taxation. A lot of the wealthy are the older so they won’t vote in a way that helps young people, they vote in a way to preserve their wealth, even if it means poor social services for people the same age as them but “poor”.

thisorthatorwhatever ,

40 years of a recession will do that to a society. An entire generation fucked.

NineMileTower ,

I have two kids. 7 and 3. Parenting is the hardest thing you will ever do.

Organichedgehog ,

I’m not unaccomplished, by any means (nice job, married to hs sweetheart, big house, nice new cars, etc), 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)

NineMileTower ,

I 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.

toomanypancakes ,
@toomanypancakes@lemmy.world avatar

You lose any sort of regenerative sleep for 5 years. Fitness routine? Bye bye. Energy? Out the window.

Oh shit, do I have kids?

NineMileTower ,

You might want to ask your doctor.

midnight_puker ,
@midnight_puker@sh.itjust.works avatar

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 🥹

tacosanonymous ,

Some of us even say, “fuck no.”

ironhydroxide ,

And for a non-zero number of those, it’s because no fuck.

TrickDacy ,

Speak for yourself

Letstakealook ,

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.

TheDemonBuer ,
@TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world avatar

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.

TrickDacy ,

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

HubertManne ,

well 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.

TrickDacy ,

Right! 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.

HootinNHollerin ,

If 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

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