japan and SOUTH korea have this insane work culture, that your lives or to live at your job, and must be drinking with t he bosses after. also heavily ostracized if you arnt making it in those countries. SK is apparently at a worst position than JAPAN birthwise goes.
china is currently have thier own crisis, thier 1-child policy has a created a deficiency of women , thats why they have become so obsessed of tracking womens lives, plus trying to "encourage sex. they also overproduce stem graduates with no job markets going around too. all this associated with HCOL as well.
plus the poor job markets for stem majors, even with tech laying off you can still find a job somewhere. but other stem have alot more requirements to enter the field. biotech, bio, Psyche if you think you can get away by not getting a PsyD or phd.
women getting education is a major factor of having less or no children, thats why there has been significant initiative in many universitis to help woman get experience in stem, like bio degrees. this does has unintentional effect of leaving men behind in bio specifically.
Cost of living
You can only raise kids properly if you can afford it.
Over here in Spain it’s because of lack of funding. Theres little to no support for child care, if you have a kid here your either working tooth to the bone or off well and even still you only have 1 kid because 2 is too expensive.
The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they’ll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then
This, 1000%. Every study I’ve looked at states the current economy makes having children more of a drain than a gain.
I can’t prove it but I suspect that they are having about as many children as they want and our expectations of ‘fertility rates’ are actually skewed by the number of unwanted pregnancies that were forced on people who then existed in the space of ‘We didn’t ask for this but now we love the little shit so I guess we’ll make the best of it.’ The world is and has been changing so fast for the last century or so that our sense of long term trends is much harder to understand.
capitalism
Other activities outcompete children.
The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they’d rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.
That’s for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don’t scale as well as they used to.
Only get pregnant if you can afford it.
OK
No, not like that
I personally think it is that western culture is a disease. We have lost our connection to nature. We don’t have a community. We don’t have a family. We are exceedingly living in Ayn Rands dystopian individualist bullshit and it is corrupting on the soul.
I mean sure but the birth rate is falling everywhere right? Not just the perfidious western pigdogs
This is such a tired old cliché I’m sure it’ll do great at the Hollywood box office.
So what’s your contribution as a better solution?
LOL, “Western culture is a disease?” Seriously? You label a huge number of the world’s cultures a disease and don’t think for a tenth of a second that you might be generalizing a bit? Painting with too broad a brush?
Man, grow up a bit before you start spouting off such ignorance online.
😅 right some hyperbole there or what! I actually don’t disagree with the rest of that comment about nature and community but you really lose people by starting with wild statements like western culture is a disease! It’s sad because they probably had some decent points (nature, community etc) but override that with the flair of the dramatic and it’s hard to take seriously!
Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.
People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.
Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?
Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.
Here in Northern Sweden the preschools in the cities are all closing down due to lack of kids. We have the opposite problem in the villages. Long waiting lists and shortages. Our municipality, population 5000, has 6 existing preschools and just built a new one. City housing costs more than 3 times as much as the villages and small towns. Families can’t afford housing in the city. It’s all rich retired people in the larger houses and young single people in tiny apartments.
TL;DR: people don’t like being packed in like sardines. Give them space to have kids.
Countries can’t have children, they’re not alive.
Check out the big brain on BreadOven
Thebes begs to differ.
For being alive or bearing children?
Bearing children. The founder, Cadmus, killed a dragon and buried the teeth in the ground and from that were “born” the Spartoi, fully grown and armed. They fought until only the strongest remained who then sired the noble houses of Thebes.
i personally am afraid that my child would live through a terrible future. also: i just dont feel like it. so maybe the existential anciety is more subconcious? idk
I know 30-somethings that live with their parents because they cannot afford their own house and there are no decent rental houses available either.
