I asked recently in the new mom's forum at my office what prevented them from having more children. Many women expressed that they would have loved to have 3-4 children instead of 1-2 but that the limiting factor was time. To have 3-4 children they would have needed to start in mid-late 20s but they and their partners could not get financially, professionally established in order to start a family at that age. Others said that the time-related logistics of multiple kids with two working parents aren't manageable beyond two. Daycare, school, extra-curriculars none of those schedules align well with working hours.
i dont have kids but have been helping out with a friend who has a 2yo while their spouse is away for a month. its insane how much even just helping out in the morning and evening destroys my schedule flexibility. i am living and dying by this 2yo's schedule. i cant go to work until the kid is fed, clothed, and diaper changed. i cant stay late at work because i gotta help put the kid down for bed. i get woken up in the middle of the night by crying. im lucky i havent had to deal with the kid getting sick, which would disrupt me in the middle of the day. now imagine having multiple kids, all with different schedules, who all need to be driven places and put down for bed and fed and have items purchased for them etc.
i was considering having kids before but after this month of taking care of a 2yo i dont think i want to. the complete lack of schedule flexibility makes it impossible to work overtime when i need to. its a slow period at work rn and im already worried about falling behind. it really is the amount of time they take. ive read a lot of articles on mothers taking worse jobs with shorter commutes and more flexible hours and i totally understand why they would need that.
The percentage of American women who have a child in their lifetime is at 85%, about than same as in the 1950s. The issue is that many more people are choosing to have fewer children. This to me indicates it’s a cost issue, not some sense of impending doom about the future. You’ve already given over to the lifestyle change, the opportunity cost, and commitment to the future of earth with 1 or 2 kids - I bet not having more is strongly financially driven.
> The percentage of American women who have a child in their lifetime is at 85%
This is going to be heavily skewed by the fact that Millenial women are in their 30s and thus will be subject to various methodologies in how they're counted for this "lifetime" figure.
My experience is that women in the US over 40 vs women under 40 (as of 2026) have a much different view of children and of marriage. This would line up with cultural changes which occurred during the early 2000s.
As for cost, this idea is promoted all the time but poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates. Poor people have more children, therefore it cannot be an issue of cost alone.
It's an issue of opportunity cost. Poor people have less income to lose by having kids, so it makes economic sense to have them when you count in social benefits.
Any woman with a stable well paying job will try to avoid the very real risks of getting passed over for promotions or illegally fired. A lot of employers still see a mother as someone who can't be dedicated to work or takes too much time off.
Then you have Hispanic Americans with much higher fertility than all other groups, even if you account for income. I think it points to a cultural problem where some women see having a child as too much of a risk, becoming dependent on a man and losing it all if he decides to abandon you.
In a more community minded culture you know you have a support network to fall back on if your husband leaves you behind. And if kids are too much of a burden you can leave them with a relative until you're ready to take them in again, and you can be confident they will get raised good. That makes the risks a lot less scary.
> poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates.
There can be a whole lot of reasons for that.
poorer people are more likely to be uneducated, have less access to contraception.
Poor people have higher infant mortality.
Children also make people poorer. the higher the fertility rate the more likely that someone will be poor.
Poorer people also tend to be more religious which can limit women's rights, their options, and increase the expectations placed on them when it comes to having children. That's especially true in undeveloped countries where women may have no choice at all.
Having children can also provide a poor woman with status and a title within society. She isn't just a nobody, she is a Mom, and there is some respect that can come with that.
> As for cost, this idea is promoted all the time but poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates. Poor people have more children, therefore it cannot be an issue of cost alone.
In these places where people have more children but are overall much poorer, is there a different in infant mortality rate? I know in the past, people having large numbers of children was in part a response to the fact that the infant mortality rate was higher.
A counterpoint to this is that we saw birth rates hover around replacement level from the 1980s until 2007. After 2007 we see a pretty steep decline up to 2026. 2007 to 2015 was mainly Gen X having kids, but this does lineup with the financial chrisis.
There's more than one lifestyle change. From our experience: When you have one kid, you take them with you; when you have two, you stop going.
I would say that going from no children to children was four times as large as the adjustment from single to married. From one child to two isn't as big - maybe the same size as getting married, maybe a bit less.
Car seats aren't really the problem in that situation though. Most people struggle to do that even without them, even with mini-vans it could be a problem.
9 kids was reasonable for people who worked on a farm, expected a bunch of their kids to die early, and needed free labor. There's really no reason for 9 kids today.
I'd consider car seat laws to be an indicator for improvements to safety expectations. They are are a lot higher now.
You didn't have an 11 seater back in the day. You just put people wherever they fit and hoped nobody noticed. It was "fine" at one point. You'd be raked over the coals for it now.
Trucks were a great loophole because you were allowed to have more people than seatbelts as long as every seatbelt was in use. At least that was my understanding of the law.
For me it was sitting on a milk crate in the back of a van. I liked watching the road pass underneath us through the rust holes.
Why is it necessary to own a house before you can have children?
That was not the case for the families I knew growing up; homeownership was the exception, not the rule. My parents had eleven children, and never got around to buying a house.
Did they at least rent a house? If not, how spacious was their apartment, how accessible was outside space for the kids to play in? If so, what was the percentage of their income was the rent?
I do think a lot of young people who grew up in suburbs mistakenly believe they need a house before they can have a kid, however, for those who have wrapped their heads around having a baby in an apartment space and cost is STILL a limiting factor. A 2nd bedroom is a significant cost increase, and you're competing with a huge market of people (young families, WFH ppl with home office, roommate setups etc). Also, once you outgrow that 2nd bedroom with kid #2 you have to move. We don't build 3-5 family bedroom apartments or condos or town-homes near job centers.
I've never felt the biological drive to reproduce. The drive to have sex, absolutely. Definitely a decent libido going on. But to raise children? Nah. Too much time, money, and stress.
I wonder why people downvoted you. My story is much the same: I could give a long list of reasons why I chose not to have children, but the simpler truth is that I never saw anything on the "pro" side of the ledger.
Anything before latex would be a based on an animal intestine eg rather the same as a sausage casing, except maybe tanned to make it durable. Not inexpensive, not very disposable. Not in widespread use.
People, especially women, have been hammered with the notion that men were evil and unnecessary and that the very concept of the nuclear family was some dark patriarchal scheme.
And now the same people who explained men were optional are wondering why, in the west, women have less kids?
You cannot spit in the air and expect it won't come back in your face.
People who have no hope for the future don’t bother having kids. Those who think things could still improve tend to have children. When you live in abject poverty, the future still looks better than the present.
People who have no hope for the future don’t bother trying to avoid having kids either though, and rarely does hopelessness result in giving up the kind of indulgences that result in unplanned children - it more often increases their appeal
I think your analysis sounds nice (to ears of a particular temperament) but is quite easily dismissed as poppycock
I don’t understand that. Do you think 40s or 50s were better. I would think more about all tech being “social prosthesis” and people just have a lot less social life…
From an economic standpoint for Americans, absolutely.
Post-WW2, the USA was an economic powerhouse. Other industrial nations had just had all their factories bombed, so the USA being untouched meant there was a massive demand for American products.
And back then, companies were loyal to their workers. Dad could get a job at the factory out of high school and it'd pay enough to buy a house, raise two kids, and provide a pension for retirement. Profits funded bonuses. Now, you've got people earning college degrees being barely able to afford an apartment. Profits are held by the shareholders and wages are kept as low as possible.
The problem is people use simple numbers like "GDP" and "Unemployment %" to define "the economy" and both of them grossly ignore actual purchasing power for the majority of American consumers.
For Americans, maybe you’re right, but
I am from east europe, WWII resulted in my country being occupied by russia. For almost 50 years. People moved to gulags, etc. But still, it didn’t get that bad.
Therefore I don’t think economy is the explanation.
Back then there was no stream of constant fearmongering on all the news channels. People read their local newspapers, some obituaries, local ads. There were a couple pages of truly important global news and that's it.
Now even to the most Internet-savvy it's often not clear what's truth and what's the alternative truth. We don't need to look for the things we want to hear - hyperoptimized algorithms deliver it to us directly to maximize engagement, so for majority it really feels like everything is getting worse.
Isn't that a mixture of because they don't expect every child to survive to adulthood, and/or these are subsistence agricultural areas who need more manual labor?
I asked recently in the new mom's forum at my office what prevented them from having more children. Many women expressed that they would have loved to have 3-4 children instead of 1-2 but that the limiting factor was time. To have 3-4 children they would have needed to start in mid-late 20s but they and their partners could not get financially, professionally established in order to start a family at that age. Others said that the time-related logistics of multiple kids with two working parents aren't manageable beyond two. Daycare, school, extra-curriculars none of those schedules align well with working hours.
i dont have kids but have been helping out with a friend who has a 2yo while their spouse is away for a month. its insane how much even just helping out in the morning and evening destroys my schedule flexibility. i am living and dying by this 2yo's schedule. i cant go to work until the kid is fed, clothed, and diaper changed. i cant stay late at work because i gotta help put the kid down for bed. i get woken up in the middle of the night by crying. im lucky i havent had to deal with the kid getting sick, which would disrupt me in the middle of the day. now imagine having multiple kids, all with different schedules, who all need to be driven places and put down for bed and fed and have items purchased for them etc.
i was considering having kids before but after this month of taking care of a 2yo i dont think i want to. the complete lack of schedule flexibility makes it impossible to work overtime when i need to. its a slow period at work rn and im already worried about falling behind. it really is the amount of time they take. ive read a lot of articles on mothers taking worse jobs with shorter commutes and more flexible hours and i totally understand why they would need that.
The percentage of American women who have a child in their lifetime is at 85%, about than same as in the 1950s. The issue is that many more people are choosing to have fewer children. This to me indicates it’s a cost issue, not some sense of impending doom about the future. You’ve already given over to the lifestyle change, the opportunity cost, and commitment to the future of earth with 1 or 2 kids - I bet not having more is strongly financially driven.
> The percentage of American women who have a child in their lifetime is at 85%
This is going to be heavily skewed by the fact that Millenial women are in their 30s and thus will be subject to various methodologies in how they're counted for this "lifetime" figure.
My experience is that women in the US over 40 vs women under 40 (as of 2026) have a much different view of children and of marriage. This would line up with cultural changes which occurred during the early 2000s.
As for cost, this idea is promoted all the time but poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates. Poor people have more children, therefore it cannot be an issue of cost alone.
It's an issue of opportunity cost. Poor people have less income to lose by having kids, so it makes economic sense to have them when you count in social benefits.
Any woman with a stable well paying job will try to avoid the very real risks of getting passed over for promotions or illegally fired. A lot of employers still see a mother as someone who can't be dedicated to work or takes too much time off.
Then you have Hispanic Americans with much higher fertility than all other groups, even if you account for income. I think it points to a cultural problem where some women see having a child as too much of a risk, becoming dependent on a man and losing it all if he decides to abandon you.
In a more community minded culture you know you have a support network to fall back on if your husband leaves you behind. And if kids are too much of a burden you can leave them with a relative until you're ready to take them in again, and you can be confident they will get raised good. That makes the risks a lot less scary.
> poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates.
There can be a whole lot of reasons for that.
poorer people are more likely to be uneducated, have less access to contraception.
Poor people have higher infant mortality.
Children also make people poorer. the higher the fertility rate the more likely that someone will be poor.
Poorer people also tend to be more religious which can limit women's rights, their options, and increase the expectations placed on them when it comes to having children. That's especially true in undeveloped countries where women may have no choice at all.
Having children can also provide a poor woman with status and a title within society. She isn't just a nobody, she is a Mom, and there is some respect that can come with that.
> As for cost, this idea is promoted all the time but poor people in developed countries and poor people in undeveloped countries have much higher fertility rates. Poor people have more children, therefore it cannot be an issue of cost alone.
In these places where people have more children but are overall much poorer, is there a different in infant mortality rate? I know in the past, people having large numbers of children was in part a response to the fact that the infant mortality rate was higher.
A counterpoint to this is that we saw birth rates hover around replacement level from the 1980s until 2007. After 2007 we see a pretty steep decline up to 2026. 2007 to 2015 was mainly Gen X having kids, but this does lineup with the financial chrisis.
There's more than one lifestyle change. From our experience: When you have one kid, you take them with you; when you have two, you stop going.
I would say that going from no children to children was four times as large as the adjustment from single to married. From one child to two isn't as big - maybe the same size as getting married, maybe a bit less.
There's also an interesting correlation between the advent of car seat / booster seat laws and the drop in number of kids per family.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
How would you have a family with 9 kids, own only one vehicle, and still go to the drive in theater today?
Car seats aren't really the problem in that situation though. Most people struggle to do that even without them, even with mini-vans it could be a problem. 9 kids was reasonable for people who worked on a farm, expected a bunch of their kids to die early, and needed free labor. There's really no reason for 9 kids today.
I'd consider car seat laws to be an indicator for improvements to safety expectations. They are are a lot higher now.
You didn't have an 11 seater back in the day. You just put people wherever they fit and hoped nobody noticed. It was "fine" at one point. You'd be raked over the coals for it now.
There is a generational divide for those who rode in the back of a truck as kids and those who never will.
Trucks were a great loophole because you were allowed to have more people than seatbelts as long as every seatbelt was in use. At least that was my understanding of the law.
For me it was sitting on a milk crate in the back of a van. I liked watching the road pass underneath us through the rust holes.
Car seat? No.
Seat belt? No.
Seat? No, not even one of those.
It takes a village to raise a child and if you don't have that expanded support structure, just having one can be overwhelming.
Society just doesn’t expect it of people any longer. I know many young people who just don’t want kids, and they are empowered to make that decision.
At some level, the beauty of having a family has ceased to be communicated.
If I had a house at 22 i would have had 6 kids. A house at 35 means much less kids.
Why is it necessary to own a house before you can have children?
That was not the case for the families I knew growing up; homeownership was the exception, not the rule. My parents had eleven children, and never got around to buying a house.
Did they at least rent a house? If not, how spacious was their apartment, how accessible was outside space for the kids to play in? If so, what was the percentage of their income was the rent?
I do think a lot of young people who grew up in suburbs mistakenly believe they need a house before they can have a kid, however, for those who have wrapped their heads around having a baby in an apartment space and cost is STILL a limiting factor. A 2nd bedroom is a significant cost increase, and you're competing with a huge market of people (young families, WFH ppl with home office, roommate setups etc). Also, once you outgrow that 2nd bedroom with kid #2 you have to move. We don't build 3-5 family bedroom apartments or condos or town-homes near job centers.
It's societal and not economic. Look at a global map of total fertility rate by country and that much is abundantly clear.
one does not exist without the other. Perhaps in the past but not at all within the last two centuries
Urbanization and industrialization is social and economic.
I prefer this question : How much trauma/abuse does a mammal species need to endure before it ceases to procreate?
We’re finding out collectively this answer.
For me, the answer was simple:
I just didn't want them.
I've never felt the biological drive to reproduce. The drive to have sex, absolutely. Definitely a decent libido going on. But to raise children? Nah. Too much time, money, and stress.
My vasectomy will be the best $800 I ever spent.
I wonder why people downvoted you. My story is much the same: I could give a long list of reasons why I chose not to have children, but the simpler truth is that I never saw anything on the "pro" side of the ledger.
The U.S. birth rate fell around 20% after the Great Recession and has never risen since. Seems like this is a pretty significant angle to focus on!
https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/data-snapshot-ten-years-a...
https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...
For some reason not even archive.li type of tools appear to show this page.
Most kids were born because there was no birth control.
There is birth control.
So...
The Ancient Egyptians had condoms.
They had a few examples of condoms, they didn’t have mass produced relatively cheap ones, or the more effective chemical based contraceptives
Anything before latex would be a based on an animal intestine eg rather the same as a sausage casing, except maybe tanned to make it durable. Not inexpensive, not very disposable. Not in widespread use.
And, uh, not very sexy?
"Babe, hang on while I go chop off some intestine. Brb"
People, especially women, have been hammered with the notion that men were evil and unnecessary and that the very concept of the nuclear family was some dark patriarchal scheme.
And now the same people who explained men were optional are wondering why, in the west, women have less kids?
You cannot spit in the air and expect it won't come back in your face.
I'm sorry, but that seems like a strawman you're constructing.
People who have no hope for the future don’t bother having kids. Those who think things could still improve tend to have children. When you live in abject poverty, the future still looks better than the present.
People who have no hope for the future don’t bother trying to avoid having kids either though, and rarely does hopelessness result in giving up the kind of indulgences that result in unplanned children - it more often increases their appeal
I think your analysis sounds nice (to ears of a particular temperament) but is quite easily dismissed as poppycock
When and where human life is sufficiently cheap, the usual solution is (of course) quiet and unacknowledged infanticide.
That assumes that those people care very little about those potential offsprings.
People who want to ensure a better future for future people might have fewer kids. Overpopulation is real.
A bit too dramatic for my taste, but yes.
They lack confidence in the future for their kids.
I don’t understand that. Do you think 40s or 50s were better. I would think more about all tech being “social prosthesis” and people just have a lot less social life…
> Do you think 40s or 50s were better
From an economic standpoint for Americans, absolutely.
Post-WW2, the USA was an economic powerhouse. Other industrial nations had just had all their factories bombed, so the USA being untouched meant there was a massive demand for American products.
And back then, companies were loyal to their workers. Dad could get a job at the factory out of high school and it'd pay enough to buy a house, raise two kids, and provide a pension for retirement. Profits funded bonuses. Now, you've got people earning college degrees being barely able to afford an apartment. Profits are held by the shareholders and wages are kept as low as possible.
The problem is people use simple numbers like "GDP" and "Unemployment %" to define "the economy" and both of them grossly ignore actual purchasing power for the majority of American consumers.
For Americans, maybe you’re right, but I am from east europe, WWII resulted in my country being occupied by russia. For almost 50 years. People moved to gulags, etc. But still, it didn’t get that bad. Therefore I don’t think economy is the explanation.
Back then there was no stream of constant fearmongering on all the news channels. People read their local newspapers, some obituaries, local ads. There were a couple pages of truly important global news and that's it.
Now even to the most Internet-savvy it's often not clear what's truth and what's the alternative truth. We don't need to look for the things we want to hear - hyperoptimized algorithms deliver it to us directly to maximize engagement, so for majority it really feels like everything is getting worse.
[dead]
People in impoverish areas with a bleak future often have many kids.
Isn't that a mixture of because they don't expect every child to survive to adulthood, and/or these are subsistence agricultural areas who need more manual labor?