[nisa]

I'm in my 40ies and in Germany and basically from my friends and surroundings I've realized the only people that have children are academics / people with established careers where both partners earn very well and have stable jobs or people on welfare where at least all necessities are covered. What's missing is people in-between, people with limited contracts, people without money in the family and people working a job that hardly pays more than what you would get with welfare.

If you look at birth rates in eastern europe after the fall of the soviet union and the establishment of neoliberal economics everwhere and the development of eastern europe economies as workbenches for western corporations with low wages the birth rates fell and are only slowly recovering now.

Before that - while circumstances where surely not better in a lot of ways - essentials like housing, childcare (kindergarden and so on) where provided and you could be assured to be fine no matter what is going on in your job.

Now you are only fine if you either on welfare and have nothing to loose anyway or earn so much that you can afford everything and risk having children. If you are in between (like most of the population around 20-40 here) it's perceived as a risky gamble.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, I do wonder if a survey question getting at "how concerned am I about the risk that I won't be able to find good work in 15 years" would be pretty well correlated with fertility rate decline. Most things I see look at current economic conditions, but I think you're right that it's the perception of future earning potential, a decade or two out, that is most stressful to parents of young children.