[dividefuel]

I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids:

#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.

#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.

The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.

[xedrac]

As someone with 5 kids, I can attest to #1. Kids are hard and expensive, but they are also the single most rewarding aspect of my life. I rushed into having kids in my early twenties, and those early years were very difficult. Now that my kids are a bit older, I am so grateful for them. My life is infinitely richer because of them, even though I may have less time and money for myself.

[southernplaces7]

>People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)

Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.

[stackskipton]

There is also #4, there is plenty of women who don't want kids. Women having kids was not option until advent of modern birth control unless they were totally celibate.

My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.

[BobaFloutist]

This is almost 100% the answer, despite it pissing literally everyone off. I really feel like the only long term solution is getting artificial wombs figured out. Last I checked, we're closer than I thought, but people are still hung up on all the ethical questions that will probably evaporate when we realize it's the only way people are largely going to have kids at all.

[missedthecue]

There is currently no scientific effort to develop an artificial womb anywhere on earth. There are several well funded efforts to get the age at which premature babies can be expected to reliably survive down to 20-21 weeks. But that's not the same thing.

If you've ever seen pharmaceutical ads, they almost always advise against taking the medication while pregnant, or to advise your physician. It's because so much of human gestation is still a black box. We do not understand how it works, only that chemicals and medication can seriously disrupt it in ways we cannot yet grasp. There is so much inter-cerebral and hormonal communication between mother and fetus that is yet to be discovered and understood, and a lot of that will depend on mapping out general cerebral mechanics, something we also haven't yet done.

People act like artificial wombs are 10-20 years away, but we are so far away we don't even have a roadmap. We don't even have an understanding of all the things we need to understand. We are in a pre-renaissance of sorts, and artificial wombs are inter-galactic space travel.

[wolvesechoes]

#5 Modern culture is all about egoism masked as pseudo-individualism and self-fulfillment through constant consumption