[than3]

don't forget education is expensive, and quite a few have received funding in predatory lending ways where the debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy without even receiving the degree.

you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.

If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.

Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.

Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.

That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.

[berberous]

You think you need two children for one to make it to 18?

[mschuster91]

The US has seen an insane rise of child and adolescent mortality over the last years [1] - and a large part of this is due to the top death cause: homicide or other firearm incidents [2], a scale orders of magnitude worse than among other developed nations.

Add on top of that the rising drug epidemic, the removal of access to reproductive and mental health care...

[1] https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/03/child-and-teen-mortalit...

[2] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/firearms-are...

[abenga]

Still, the probability of dying while a child in the US is minuscule (about 35 in 100,000 from the first source cited)? Hardly enough to have an additional child to make the expected number out of the two at 19 to be 1 child.

[mschuster91]

It's still way too high - once a week there's some sort of shooting incident in the US [1], and that doesn't include all the other mass shooting incidents in general society [2], nor the shooting incidents that don't kill multiple people. Frankly, for me as an European, these numbers are insane - and the worst thing is, even after outright massacres nothing changes.

It's one thing if society learns something from incidents like we did with after the mass murder at Winnenden 2009. But in the US, it's "thoughts and prayers" and that's it - utterly dystopian.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

[caeril]

School shootings are a rounding error in the youth homicide statistics, but they definitely make for good cable news coverage.

The elephant in the room is inner-city, largely gang-related violence. Stopping those kids from obtaining firearms by restricting legal purchases makes about as much sense as keeping criminals away from encryption by restricting E2E encryption on WhatsApp.

For some reason, Hacker News thinks the former is absolutely possible, despite knowing the latter is not. Weird.

[pjc50]

I didn't really want to bring this up, but .. yeah. The reaction to the deaths of children being to libel their parents by claiming that the whole incident was made up is one of the most incomprehensibly disgusting things about American politics. It should not have been necessary to sue Alex Jones over that, his public audience should simply have evaporated overnight of their own accord.

"Protecting children" is only ever brought up in US politics for dumb controlling initiatives that do anything but protect children. Actually protecting children is taboo.

[than3]

Yes, its not a belief, its simple risk management perspective.

You need at least two with modern medicine. You have a limited time period to have children, after which you can't have more without significant consequence, and you won't know ahead of time about the risks or need.

There are increasing mortality rates, and increasing unmanageable risks (i.e. regulation, and other aspects of government working against parents).

If you want your family line to continue and survive, you need at least 2 children, if not 4 or more. 4 is better.

There is cost, but that's what needs to be possible that no one talks about. That actuarial all death discrepancy during the pandemic is most likely attributed to lack of general availability of medical care during that time. The risks change without notice. During the pandemic, in my role supporting our IT support staff (System Engineers helping overflows) I heard from people across the country.

Some families were nearly wiped out, imagine if 3/4 of your family died and it was a large family. One man I spoke with was just crazy with grief, he had to help with funeral arrangements for eight of his family members in the span of a few weeks.