Why Americans Aren’t Having Babies

“To be a human being, for most people, meant to have children,” says Anastasia Berg, co-author with Rachel Wiseman of the new book “What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.”

“You didn’t think about how much it would cost, it was taken for granted,” she says.

But unlike their parents and grandparents, the authors say, younger Americans view kids as one of many elements that can create a meaningful life. Weighed against other personal and professional ambitions, the investments of child-rearing don’t always land in children’s favor.

With less pressure to have kids, economists say, more people feel they need to be in the ideal financial, emotional and social position to begin a family.

Giovanni Perez, 38, has been trying to convince his wife, Mariah Sanchez, 32, that they’re ready to become parents.

“People less well-off than us are having kids and I see it every day, and I’m pretty sure we could do better than most of them,” says Perez, an after-school art teacher in the Bronx, N.Y.

Sanchez isn’t sold.

With a single mom during her early childhood and a brother 15 years her junior, Sanchez grew up helping with diaper changes and bottle feedings. Before she has kids of her own, she wants to move from the couple’s one-bedroom apartment into a bigger place. She also hopes to climb the ranks at the advertising agency where she works, ideally doubling their combined income of $100,000.

“I know what it’s like for a child whose parent wasn’t prepared for them,” says Sanchez. Still, she admits, the amount she thought she needed to earn before having children was far lower a few years ago. “It feels like a moving target,” she says.

Her mom, Michelle Morales, had Sanchez when she was 21. That was late by her Brooklyn community’s standards, she says. (A dramatic drop in teenage births is another factor driving the fertility rate down.)

“There was no planning for kids, you just had them,” says Morales, a 53-year-old college adviser in Naples, Fla.

While she worries she may never be a grandparent—“which I’d like to experience before I leave this Earth”—she respects the intention with which her children are approaching parenthood.

“These kids are a lot smarter in making decisions for themselves,” she says.

How much kids actually cost

Nobody will dispute that kids are expensive. Whether they have become more so in recent years—and the extent to which that is driving down birthrates—is more complicated.

Parents are spending more on their children for basics such as housing, food and education—much of that due to rising prices. Another factor, however, is the drive to provide children with more opportunities and experiences.

Middle-class households with a preschooler more than quadrupled spending on child care alone between 1995 and 2023, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Department of Agriculture data by Scott Winship at think tank the American Enterprise Institute.

Yet only about half of the increase is due to rising prices for the same quality and quantity of care. (Child care prices are up 180% overall since the mid-90s, according to BLS data.)

The remaining half is coming from parents choosing more personalized or accredited care for a given 3- to 5-year-old, or paying for more hours, Winship says.

“People say kids are more expensive, but a lot of this comes from parenting becoming more intensive so people are spending more on their kids,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland who researches children and families.

It has always been costly and time-consuming to raise kids, she says, and it has always come into conflict with other priorities. What’s changed is that more people are deciding not to have children at all.

“If it were socially acceptable for people in the past to remain childless, I wonder how many of them would have made the same decision,” Kearney says.

‘My autonomy’

Beth Davis loves her niece and nephew. But she isn’t envious of how much time and money her siblings spend bouncing between volleyball tournaments, baseball games and trips to the mall to replace outgrown clothes.

Davis and Edenfield enjoy their life in New Orleans. PHOTO: CHRISTIANA BOTIC FOR WSJ

Davis, who works in marketing, and her husband, Jacob Edenfield, 41, both say they always expected to hit a moment when they, too, wanted to become parents. When that still hadn’t happened by the time they started dating in their mid-30s, they decided to start reorienting their lives.

“People told me when I was younger, ‘Oh, you’ll grow into it, you’ll develop those feelings, you’ll want to start a family,’ and that just did not happen,” says Edenfield, a creative director.

They moved to New Orleans a year ago in search of the city’s joie de vivre—and other childless millennials.

With a combined income of $280,000, the couple is able to put about $4,500 a month toward what they hope will be a mid-50s retirement. Another $2,600 pays rent on a sprawling Creole townhouse. The remaining $8,000 or so—much of which they assume would have been eaten up by child-rearing—goes primarily toward enjoying their lives.

The couple often dines at the city’s upscale restaurants (including two recent $700+ dinners), regularly works out at a high-end wellness center and recently paid cash for a BMW. Edenfield meditates for an hour every morning and works on the novel he’s writing at the local corner bar many nights. For companionship, the couple fosters a rotating cast of Bengal cats.

Edenfield’s sibling, Caitlin Hopkins, was inspired in part by her brother and sister-in-law’s lifestyle to also remain childless. While she and her husband, Will, love kids, they say they would rather focus on being the best possible aunt and uncle. “And then I get to still have my autonomy and routine,” says Caitlin, a 35-year-old oyster farmer in Portland, Maine.

Changed expectations

The longer people wait to have kids, research shows, the less likely they are to have them.

One reason is biological: Women 35 and older are at increased risk of infertility and pregnancy complications. The other is social. People who already have fully formed adult lives are more reluctant to give up their freedom, says Brown University health economist Emily Oster. “All of a sudden you’ve chosen a different identity,” she says.

“I had never known someone that was 40 and married without kids, that would have been the weirdest thing I had ever heard,” says Galko, who works in software sales from Arlington, Va.

The couple, now engaged, dated for three years in their 20s before spending the next decade in other relationships, thinking kids would happen someday. But when they got back together in 2019, they decided they were too old and too set in their existing lives to start a family of their own.

While they both mourned that other possible path, they say they are content and have no regrets. Much of their disposable income now goes to travel, including recent trips to Greece, Spain and Guatemala in the span of three months.

For Meslar, who works in growth strategy for a CBD company, part of the justification for leaning into her kid-free reality was wanting to avoid making the same sacrifices she saw her parents make.

She says she can’t remember her mom or dad buying anything new for themselves while she was growing up so they could afford for her and her three siblings to join sports leagues and attend out-of-state colleges.

“I don’t think I could really live up to the example they set. Or I think I could, but I don’t think it would bring me the same joy,” she says.

MJ Petroni and Oleg Karpynets both went into their 20s wanting to be dads. Now in their late 30s, the couple no longer sees children in their future.

“It was almost shocking to me when I realized having a fulfilling life didn’t necessarily include my own kids,” says Petroni, 39, who runs an artificial-intelligence strategy firm from home in Portland, Ore. For 38-year-old Karpynets, who runs a neighborhood library, that has meant going back to school to get his business administration degree, hosting monthly parties sometimes with over 100 people and going out with friends whenever he wants.

An only child, Petroni says continuing the family name and giving his parents grandchildren was “always just kind of a given” during his suburban upbringing on the central coast of California. More recently, however, it’s his parents who have required care. He says he’s spent over $100,000 on their medical and living expenses, as well as travel to visit them, over the past three years.

“I would like to be able to put more toward that than I’m currently able to,” he says, adding it would be more difficult to do so if the couple decided to have kids.

The other side of that coin, points out Oster, the Brown University researcher, is how an increase in childlessness will play out as millennials age.

“A lot of our social structures kind of assume when people get old the person who is responsible for them is their children,” Oster says.

Climate concerns

When Allie Mills and Connor Laubenthal get married next year, they’ll be flanked on both sides of the altar by friends and family members who they say mostly intend to remain childless.

“With geopolitical issues, climate change, it’s like what are you bringing them into and then dropping them off and saying, ‘good luck!’” says Mills, who is 27 and works for a tech company. “There’s no real confidence that things are going to get better.”

Mills, who was raised in an evangelical Christian household, says her mindset is a radical departure from growing up wanting to be a mother and a homemaker. She struggles with anxiety, and worries how her own mental health would affect a child. And though her email signature proudly displays her status as “dog mom of two,” she says the only form of human parenthood she could picture at this point is fostering.

The couple’s other consideration is financial. Despite both having well-paying jobs, they say they haven’t been able to afford a house in Boston, where they live, amid low supply and high interest rates.

Laubenthal, a 27-year-old asset manager, calculated that they could retire at 55 with the same spending power if they don’t have kids. He then did the math to account for two children, factoring in costs of daycare, college, clothing and other essentials. That pushed their retirement back by 13 years, to age 68.

“That’s a big gap,” he says. His conclusion: Retire early, and skip kids.

So many pointless jobs among the childless in this article.

Free version

Perhaps it’s because younger generations have become more selfish, fearful, and straight guys have a gay guy or two on the side to stick it into.

Get a load of the Wall Street Journal Boomer comments at the end.

Cause everyone's gay

[quote]The shift means that childlessness may be emerging as the main driver of the country’s record-low birthrate.

Main driver … As opposed to what? What other “driver” of record-low birthrate? Has the WSJ finally laid off all its copyeditors?

And (B) so what? Why should we care what people do with their lives? The piece doesn’t say.

They also snuck in that the drop in teenage pregnancy is bringing down the fertility rate. That should have been a bigger point, not buried in the article.

8 billion people and rising - something's gotta give. Do the math. People can't be reproducing like rabbits forever.

When it happened in Japan and S. Korea, it was considered an aberration, nothing that would ever happen in the States. Japan is a totally dying country because of their aging population. Obviously, the US is a different argument because of the various immigrants but it should be a concern. It also fuels right wing arguments that the left is trying to kill off the white population.

It’s a hard job and women don’t get enough help. Too many men are sperm donors and just disappear. As a gay man I couldn’t imagine getting along with a woman well enough to raise a child. There are too many of us so it’s a good thing to have a low birth rate.

Will no one think of the future Nepo-babies?

Well now thanks to the banning of abortion there will be a lot more of them.

I'm pretty comfortable with my life, and the idea of giving up my free time to take care of a child sounds like hell.

The idea of wanting to raise a child is as strange to me as wanting to have a flat tire or to hoe a field. (But then, I had a crappy & abusive childhood)

Kids today are so confusing, changing genders all the time. Who can keep up?

It’s not just we can’t afford ‘em. We all know the planet is dying even though the denial runs thick

Why bring a child into this world if they’ll only be eaten at age 25 by a cannibal hobos after human civilization collapses ?

All the brand new, millennial, rich Chinese moving into my neighborhood are. A variety walk my block everyday pushing strollers and have a minimum of 3 kids.

I’d be afraid to be a woman of child bearing age in the abortion crazy states. You can’t receive proper care for a non viable pregnancy. Women have died, or nearly died, from ectopic pregnancies.

R11 Similar patterns in the decline of education. For example, black education is low but so are the dropout rates compared to 20-30 years ago.

Helicopter parenting is definitely part of it. Parents back in the day did not constantly hover over their kids. But now, that's almost a requirement or you are considered a "bad" parent. Most people are just not ready to put it all aside to constantly hover over a kid. I'm not!

To continue to R24, the slower learning kids are actually staying in school compared to previous generations so therefore, it looks like education is declining but it’s actually not.

And like this, teenagers are getting knocked up less so that has a lot to do with the declining birth rate.

Now Republicans are demonizing childless women. Creep Vance is referring to "childless cat ladies" with contempt. Idiot Loomer says Kamala is unfit to be president because she doesn't have children. Apparently if you don't have children you don't deserve any rights at all.

Good. We’re running out of resources as it is. By the time today’s children and subsequently their children are of age, the coastlines of the world will be underwater, there’s going to be food shortages, pandemics, political instability and violence (obviously modern day USA is no longer immune), while the world implodes. Don’t populate - masturbate.

Is that where the man goes up in the woman?

Watch "Idiocracy" (now a documentary.) The basic premise is that the "wrong" people are the ones having children -- and too many of them.

All of these oligarchs who want women to push out kids to support their economic machine are also the same assholes who think nothing of engaging in price gouging, including for essentials. They're leaving us high and dry as the world burns down. Fuck 'em.

Kids are hellish and people are finally liberating themselves from it.

The country is run by childless cat ladies!!!

Who can afford to have a baby in the last three years?

We live in a barren age.

We live in a Barron age.

We live in a baronage.

I love kids but today life is not kid friendly

Not wanting to raise children was one of my smartest moves.

[quote] Main driver … As opposed to what? What other “driver” of record-low birthrate? Has the WSJ finally laid off all its copyeditors?

The article is saying the decision of many woman to have no children. Is the main driver rather than a decrease in family size among those who do choose to have children (which is another possible driver).

There’s.Lon stupidity on the WSJ’s part In this particular instance. I’m not sure what you think your copy editor should have corrected.

This is an incel trigger! They hate that women aren’t desperate to have kids anymore.

R31 said it!

Plus kids are gross and annoying.

They hate that people are doing stuff like traveling, writing books and enjoying life instead of working two jobs trying to feed a pack of kids.

Most people want to have babies, but most people want only one or two kids, not five of them.

Plus, a LOT OF PEOPLE feel like children are totally expensive and that they won't receive much help from society for raising them.

There's also the fact that people nowadays KNOW that having children should always be a conscious choice NOT AN OBLIGATION, let's face it some 25-30% of the people who are parents should have never been parents in the first place, it's a good thing that people are less impulsive when it comes to generating a new life nowadays.

Yes, the expectation that the mother should be in the room with the child every waking moment is insanity. It’s not good for the kids. It’s not traditional. It’s not healthy for marriages. A coworker of mine lost her shit because her mother in law left her baby alone (but in full view) while she painted her cabinets. Mother in law couldn’t see the issue. Coworker thought MIL should have been holding the baby for the whole afternoon. What!!? The other young moms agreed and said the sleeping baby could have DIED because grandma was watching him through a glass door vs holding him for hours. Uh, team grandma all the way.

Women never hovered over each child like this. Rich women were absent because they had staff and poor women shoved those kids out the door and said don’t come home until I call you for dinner. I cannot imagine my mother hovering over me physically and emotionally. When I read about these gen z kids claiming to have anxiety, ptsd, depression, neurodivergence etc I can understand it. I would have snapped too if I was raised like that.

Also men used to do more because young boys would go to work with dad and that work wasn’t an hour commute each way with 60-80 hours required to avoid layoffs. It was farming or a trade close to home. Dad gone from 7-7 in the new “traditional family” is also insane and unhealthy. Throw in isolating new mothers in the ‘burbs with no support as a display of traditional nuclear family values vs the reality of the old days where she’d live near family and her older relatives would help her. Any wonder postpartum depression is so common.

In almost all respects, this is a welcome development, but the economic and social consequences will be profound and difficult to deal with and will arrive relatively quickly.

Providing necessary services requires a stable or rising population level while Medicare and Social Security depend on a growing population. Yet, what is one of the primary concerns in the current campaign? Excessive immigration, believe it or not

I see what you’re saying, r40 but a decrease from 1 or 2 kids to zero kids is nothing to hang a whole piece on.

You know what the real point of that piece was? It was clickbait, pure and simple, to get all the Boomer readers to scold selfish, self-involved young people for not having families.

I accepted the suggestion at r8 to check out the Boomer comments at the end, and they were pretty nauseating. What lonely empty lives these childless people lead (traveling, enjoying themselves etc). Who will take care of these selfish childless people when they’re old and ill etc.

Plus, right behind was a stifling grandma's brag book of how my beautiful children and grandchildren are life's greatest blessing, my best work etc etc. the greatest joy, the most fulfilling. Which, fine, ok.

But that was the point of the piece—to give readers the excuse to scold and to preen, not to break the news that people having zero children *STOP THE PRESSES* is leading to low birth rates in the country. So maybe copy editors couldn’t have fixed this one, after all.

I can tell you why THIS American isn’t having babies

The problem is that you have no incentives for people to have babies. In my country we have a year paid maternity leave and two months paid paternity leave. We also have very cheap kindergarten. In the US the mandatory maternity leave is only 12 weeks. It's way too short.

R47. A decrease from 1 to 2 children to zero is an ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS difference demographically and it would have been a sloppy article had they not noted it. Why should they not report the explanation of a very important phenomenon? If people are having zero children the extinction of the human race occurs in about 115 years. With one child per woman, it will take quite a number of generations to occur.

Along with the threat of nuclear war and climate change, the changing demographic trajectory of the human race is the biggest factor that will affect our daily lives. It is vastly UNDER-REPORTED. Is the WSJ not supposed to report on it because some people will use it to stupid ends?

In 25 years we will have to only go outside at night during the summer. To have a good food crop will be the exception. Food will be prohibitively expensive. Oligarchs will rent you your life. 10 people will own 95 percent of everything . There will be a probe up your ass and in your brain delivering your thoughts and your turds to the highest bidder. Why would anyone choose to bring a child into that nightmare.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

Trump will tell his supporters all the very BEST people are being turned into Soylent Green and they’d immediately line up to be processed.

The problem—they’d taste NASTY.

R45, as someone who was a child in the 90s, it has been wild to see the attitude towards playing outside as kids change so drastically. It used to be something that was just a given. Now, it's treated like it's a danger. Which is why soooo many kids now end up so socially and developmentally stunted.

R49. What country are you from? Virtually every western country has a lower birth rate than the US. Unless you are from asia or Africa, I’d be surprised if your country’s birth rate is higher.

I’m not necessarily arguing against the policies you mentioned, but the irony is that the US manages a significantly higher birth rate despite having some of the least child friendly policies.

There's no people shortage in India and Nigeria, both are rapidly increasing population, plenty of people who are wanting to work, and maybe come to the US. Many are educated too.

There is no people shortage in India currently, but even there the birth rate has already dropped to only the replacement rate.

R50 your analysis was entirely absent from that piece. As was any discussion of how many people are having zero kids today, compared to how many zero-kid people from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. The piece discusses what, a dozen people? “More people” are deciding not to have kids, the author says.

My point in r47 stands—this was a virtually contentless piece whose only purpose was to provide an opportunity for child-centric people to preen and scold.

As to your point that the human race will become extinct based on this so-called trend … well, one can only hope.

Correct. There was no discussion of how many children people had ten or 30 years ago. Nor any discussion of what color if couch the childless interviewees preferred. Or where they had there last vacation. Or whether they are vegetarian.

You are also correct that there was no discussion in the article of the economic effects of this tend. Or of its effects on the future ability to man the armed forces.

When you have more leisure maybe you can continue the list of things not in the article that no imagined would be there.

Snarky, but you missed, r59. If a news outlet runs a piece claiming to be about a trend, it should be based on more data than “some people.” You pointed out some possible reasons that a news outlet such as WSJ, which focuses on the economy, might find such a purported trend newsworthy. The fact that the piece totally omitted that analysis signals either that there is no such trend, or that its author doesn’t have anything to back up a claim of economic relevance.

Or, as I said earlier, that it is pure clickbait.

You'd (possibly) make a better journalist than the author/editor of that WSJ piece. But to be on the safe side, keep your current job, if you have one.

One need only check the mommy blogs. These days, it seems as if 1 in every 8 kid is born with some kind of spectrum-tard-special-needs-disorder. It's like spinning a wheel of chance out there.

It does seem like having a healthy baby is a bigger crapshoot than it used to be. My sister has a 19 year old autistic fragile x kid and ... holy fuck, what a nightmare.

R62 what is an x kid? They’re on twitter a lot? The impression I get is poor people carelessly spit out kids like they’re taking a crap and assume the state will take care of them and middle class and above refuse to have them unless they can give them the best of everything. It’s pretty much like Idiocracy.

Fragile x. You can google it.

Bull-fucking-shit R50. Overpopulation is going to kill us all. Do you really think the Earth has the carrying capacity for the exponential population growth that’s happened over the last 200 years? Fertilizer from fossil fuels is what made all possible. And that is coming to an end.

R61 made me laugh! I’m glad I’ve never encountered a mommy blog.

It costs a fortune to raise kids these days.

Replacement rate doesn't matter much in India, there is still a population boom coming, read the article, more Indians are needed as doctors, the west doesn't seem to want to become doctors anymore, we get them from India.

Oh great another DL reminder of why I never ever want to visit India

I know three people who visited India and they all said they wouldn't go back for a million dollars.

I worked with a lady who was born in Texas to Indian parents and even SHE said there are places in India she would never go to. Never told why.

She didnt need to say why. We have eyes and google and can see for oursleves why.

Some of them worship RATS and have buildings dedicated to their care. It’s called Jainism I think. That’s enough to keep me from going to India. 🤢🤮🤢🤮🤢🤮

Honestly why would a woman volunteer for kids? Aside from being bitched at from every political religious and cultural side imaginable that they arent raising their kids the correct way, they basically have to raise kids themselves with little tangible help from their male partners, and then once the kid is grown and they are no longer fertile they have to rebuild their life from scratch. Women aren't allowed an identity if they are mothers.

I know women who put in countless hours of sacrifice to bring kids into this world only for the father to drag them down with their selfishness and immaturity and then ditch them for someone younger/hotter/newer. Their kids still talk to daddy and pretend hes still a good guy and the woman is left picking up the pieces.

Fuck that.

Also, they have to work their ass off to pick the right partner before they're even the age of 30 or it's too late for them to have kids.

Again, fuck that.

It's not just that kids are so expensive. The cost of housing has just exploded over the past 30 years. Plus student debt, same thing, for many college grads.

This fact is what all the right wingers and religious nuts are all pissed about.

If only women could actually give birth to their pets

My mother was certainly one to not have children. But societal pressures forced her to. Much to my eternal damnation.

I had to laugh at all the Boomers on there saying, "Wait until you're 75 and don't have kids." As if having kids somehow insures you a future with a kid still 1. alive and 2. that still speaks to you. My dad is in his 80's, has 4 kids who refuse to speak to him because he was a monster. And he never had any friends outside of his marriage so he's completely alone except for his moocher wife who put him in a home because she refuses to take care of him.

[quote]Some of them worship RATS and have buildings dedicated to their care. It’s called Jainism

It should be called Julieism named after my friend Julie.

[quote]Some of them worship RATS and have buildings dedicated to their care. It’s called Jainism I think. That’s enough to keep me from going to India.

Such a primitive, savage people.

True r76. Asshole Boomers who paid for college working a part-time job and rented their first apartment for $200 a month and then bitch and moan that today's young people are just lazy because they're not out on their own and having kids can just go fuck themselves.

Student debt and the cost of living are insane, it's very hard to get ahead in today's world.

[quote]This fact is what all the right wingers and religious nuts are all pissed about.

AKA "white people aren't having lots of kids!"

What's ironic is that Millennials/Gen Z skew Democrat and liberal so if they did have kids, those kids wouldn't be raised to be conservative religous bigots, so it kind of defeats the purpose of having a whole generation of young white Republican religious fanatics that the right winger religious nuts dream about. You'd basically have a whole generation of autistic Billie Eilishes.

R65. Do you have a literacy problem to accompany your foul personality? Please cite in my post where I expressed regret at the declining fertility rate.

Personally. I welcome most aspects of a declining population, but if you think it will come without severe economic and social consequences, you are even more stupid than your post suggests (and that is already quite stupid,)

R68. Replacement rate DOES matter very much in India. .Yes, à country with a low birth rate can still have a growing population TEMPORARILY, but in the end the result is the same. This is a well recognised phenomenon.

[quote] Why Americans Aren’t Having Babies

With the sexual awakening much of the baby batter that previously had been delivered to females vag, is now being redirected to other areas, namely orally or anally - into either their mouths or up their ass. With less jizz to the prime target, it’s just inevitable that there will be less kids.

r83 a $200 apartment was considered expensive back then...when you consider most of them were making about $2 per hour.

It’s simply too expensive to marry and start a family. Buying a house is now out of reach for many people.

'but if you think it will come without severe economic and social consequences, you are even more stupid than your post suggests (and that is already quite stupid,)'

This is so true. That's why social and religious pressures were in place. As oppressive as they were they were there for a reason. We no longer have those reasons for us. Or at least a number of cultures no longer have those reasons and the consequences for them will be dire. Personally I don't give a fuck. I'm now old and those social and religious pressures for me personally caused so much anguish and pain so that those institutions can turn to ash and there will be no regrets from me. Though I won't be around to see it.

I realized young that having kids was not for me. I have WAY too much anxiety to put that on kids and I would have been resentful if I had had them. First of all, my parents were poor and thus, I'm poor even though I put myself through college on student loans (which kept me poor). I think people who don't have money should not be having kids. It's a shitty life to condemn someone to. I guess you hope your kid does better, but my parents always made sure to make my sister and I felt shitty for choosing to go to college. They didn't like how liberal my sister and I became after college and thought it made us "uppity" which tells you what you need to know about them. I spent 30 years just trying to keep my head above water financially and trying to avoid becoming homeless which meant living in tiny, studio apartments. I can't even imagine trying to have a kid 30 years ago in that situation.

I know far too many single women who decided to become mothers at later ages for whatever reasons and I watch them struggle financially to provide a life to their kids. It's sad really, that they decided to do this for such selfish reasons. I also have really shitty genes so my choice to not pass those on was a good one. I mean, my sister and I had breast cancer, my brother has MS, my father has Parkinsons and my mother is currently in the process of dying from HORRIBLE dementia. And ALL of us struggle with obesity. No fucking way I would want to pass that shit on. My brother did. Had two girls and both are so obese that it's sad.

So many fat kids today.

If someone doesn't want children, don't have them. Otherwise, you'll fuck up their lives by not wanting them. They'll know.

My much older siblings had a slew of children starting when I was in my early teens. They saw me as a built-in babysitter and I was good with it at the time. I was no older than those kids than my siblings were me. Now those kids are more like younger siblings than nieces and nephews.

But by the time I'd hit 20 I knew I'd done my time. Never would I have kids and my 2 younger siblings feel the same.

The realization that every little thing I said or did would forever imprint upon them somehow scared the crap out of me. and I had issues with what was expected of me in the way of administering discipline when they misbehaved. I don't hit but I was told it was ok as a last resort. and on a few occasions I did.

just no.

It's always hard living with the knowledge that your parents wanted a son but you're not the son they wanted. The anger you live with eats at your soul from a very young age. It poisons every moment of your life and there is nothing to do about it. When I hear a mother loves her child no matter what I think what planet are you from? When I hear of a young mother who killed her infant I think that child dodged a major bullet.

R85 Is a fucking Kunt Cunt go feed your retarded black child bitch

R96. Wow. I underestimated your foulness. An undisguised racist.

[quote]Please cite in my post where I expressed regret at the declining fertility rate.

Don’t be disingenuous r85. I’m not r65, but I'll do his work for him. Here is where you expressed regret at the declining birth rate:

[quote]A decrease from 1 to 2 children to zero is an ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS difference demographically. If people are having zero children the extinction of the human race occurs in about 115 years.

And again here:

[quote]Along with the threat of nuclear war and climate change, the changing demographic trajectory of the human race is the biggest factor that will affect our daily lives.

So yes, that poster was absolutely correct that you expressed regret at the prospect of a declining birth rate.

Although I don’t endorse that poster's rude response to your rude post, I do endorse his view that overpopulation, not under population, is by far the greater threat to our well-being on this planet.

[quote]It's always hard living with the knowledge that your parents wanted a son but you're not the son they wanted. The anger you live with eats at your soul from a very young age.

This is the story of so many gay men.

Overpopulation is an issue in the third world, not in first world countries. But of course the mere suggestion that third worlders stop shitting out kids and practice family planning and use birth control is confronted with hysterical shouts of "racism! Eugenics!"

It's a no-win situation. These countries will continue to shit out kids and overpopulate and strain the Earth's resources until everything becomes unbearable and humanity goes extinct.

R98 Dear God Your illiteracy and stupidity are truly BOUNDLESS You spelled out in plain text that what you say is not true. I’m aghast at your stupidity

I did NOT post the racist post at R96

My friends and contemporaries all have kids who are now teenagers and young adults and holy fuck so many emotional/mental issues, and a few have substance abuse issues. It's a never-ending drama for their parents having to deal with their fucked up kids.

I've never regretted not having children. No thank you.

Nice that people the world over are finally following Bill Hick's sage advice. A little late, but better late than never

"There's too many people in the world. Quit rutting! Let's work out this food/air deal.......THEN go back to your rutting."

R91 - I just got off a zoom call with my mom's dementia doc, who gives her a 25% chance of living out the year. We just put her in memory care this week.

anyway I wanted to send you a quick hug. So many of the things in your family that you described, the MS, obesity, Parkinson's, cancer, etc have strong connections to family trauma

Thank you, r105. Yes, we had major family trauma. It took a lot of years of therapy and finally EMDR to heal me but it still affects me in some ways.

I'm so sorry about your mom. Dementia is one of the worst things I've ever witnessed. My mom just tested positive for Covid in the home she's in (asymptomatic). So no visits for a few days. I wouldn't wish Dementia on my worst enemy. Well, maybe on Trump but that's it.

Zzzzzzz R100 must be typing from the 19th century, a lot of third world countries are NOT overpopulated, have similar birth rates to the USA, plus getting information and access to contraceptive methods can be an Issue in countries where the majority of the population is uneducated.

False r107

Honestly, out of all my friends and family that gave kids, maybe two or three of them are “normal”.

The rest have ADD, ADHD, asthma, nut allergies, gluten allergies, milk allergies, autism, oppositional defiant disorder, and any number of other issues where the kid can’t be in public, play sports, play outside, eat food - it’s insane. Who wants to deal with all that crap? It’s exhausting.

Babies not having babies, hmm, hmm, hmm.

R108 your Mama's ass might be false, but that some 3rd world countries are barely populated and that many of them have similar or lower birthrates than the US is a FACT.

But the ones overpopulating are a huge problem r111.

By "declining birth rate" in third world countries it usually means they're having five kids instead of eight kids. Not really solving the problem.

Ok R113 keep believing stereotypes while in reality is a lot of middle class fraus on states like Utah, Nebraska, Wyoming having six, seven, eight kids these days.

r114 they are not a terribly significant number of the population.

Mormons aren't shitting out kids like they used to.

R113 Many, many developing countries have birth rates around or below the replacement rate, including most of Asia and Latin America. It’s really only sub-Saharan African that still has the stereotypical birth rates you reference.

[quote]R5 So many pointless jobs among the childless in this article.

You think most people do “meaningful work”?

[quote]r27 Idiot Loomer says Kamala is unfit to be president because she doesn't have children.

Strange, considering the argument against working women used to be that they gave too much time to their children at home.

[quote]r50 If people are having zero children the extinction of the human race occurs in about 115 years.

But won’t everyone get bigger apartments as the cities and towns empty out? That sounds nice - and quieter!

And thanks to AI, we can have more help for the elderly instead of expecting younger people to do the work.

The AI robots won’t have that Gen Z flavor SASS MOUTH, either!

(And we can program them to know what a Madame Alexander doll is.)

The population decline is the fault of boomers. Boomers were born into families that had four to six kids. But when they grew up, boomers had only 1 to 3 kids.

Fault makes it sound like the boomers did something wrong r123.

If you want to have children, better 1-2 that you can afford to feed and educate than more than that of which you can’t.

Besides all that, all my co workers complained that the sex was not the same after giving birth, is that a surprise?!!! You just squeezed out a watermelon thru your hole! Can the doctor fix it? They said even then it's not the same, I guess it shreds it to hell.

R125 don’t kegel exercises help with that? No?