I feel like 96% of things that 1 in 4 millennials and Gen Z-ers won’t do is due to finances.
We already killed the diamond industry, apparently
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We have a complex and frankly fragile system of family members who care for one another’s kids and maintain specific work schedules so that one grownup is always available in my family, that we built from scratch (not really from a cultural background where this is the norm, it’s out of necessity) and it’s frankly the only way my family has been able to support any children.
I’m genuinely not sure how a person pays for rent/mortgage, utilities, gas and food while also paying the kinds of prices that childcare costs in even low COL areas of the US.
The only happy parents I know have family who regularly watch their kids, including overnight stays. The kids love it because they spend time with more family, and my friends love it because it means they still have time to work and do things for themselves outside of childcare. I frankly don’t know how the average atomized American family copes with raising children.
It’s called the nuclear family because of how atomized we are :kelly:
Isn’t that literally true?
yeah I think they’re using the same etymology.
I frankly don’t know how the average atomized American family copes with raising children.
Apparently they are coping very poorly, as per recent surveys:
“After breaking out responses from people with children under age 18, the APA reported that 48 percent of those parents and caregivers describe themselves as completely overwhelmed.”
“The parent-specific breakdown also found that 41 percent said most days they “were so stressed they couldn’t function” — double the number reported by non-parents — while 42 per cent said they were so stressed they felt numb.”
“Raising a child costs money” is an complete unsupportable situation for any society and represents completely indefensible failure.
I am also unsure if the world is ending. The last generation of humans may already be alive. They may already be adults with college degrees. Mad Max is fine to watch on screen, but would be a horrifying reality to live in.
I do not want to subject people to the upcoming WW3.
Humanity is going to survive, perhaps in small isolated pockets that never reach the potential capitalism squandered.
That being said, if I were to have a kid I’d be taking on the burden of finding a way to set them up for a good life. I don’t see a good life in near to mid term future for anyone not extremely lucky in birth circumstance.
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Seriously , if Kurzgesagt actually thinks that I’m absolutely disgusted, that sounds like Hitler particles shit right there.
EDIT: disregard the stuff I said about Stalin’s quote. I double checked it and apparently that quote wasn’t even something he actually said.
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teahc your children to find water by smell like an antelope
The world is closer to ended than ending. More than half of complex macroscopic life is already dead or replaced by monoculture/livestock. Today’s fossil record would lbe considered post extinction event to future alien paleontologists.
This is my reasoning too.
The last generation of humans may already be alive
Would you mind elaborating?
Some of you are alright don’t come to earth tomorrow
dion’t buy any green bananas
The end of human civilization may be occurring within our lifetime. So children born today may be fighting in wars over water or killed in nuclear attacks twenty years from now. They may not be able to survive these events. Meaning, they won’t have children of their own.
If the damage is severe enough, the human population might bottleneck to where we won’t have enough genetic diversity to repopulate the earth. Sort of like how cheetahs are going extinct because they’re all born with the same genetic disorder and there aren’t any cheetahs without it.
I hate being reminded that it costs money to go to the hospital and get your baby delivered in the US. Yeah it’s super expensive having a kid but i didn’t have to pay $10k+ to have it removed from my partner
All “healthcare” executives should experience their skin being flayed from their bodies
“skin to skin” hospital bill
Wtf, what is the hospital doing here?
It’s a fee for allowing the mother to hold her baby because that’s how fucked up our society is
$40 a minute fee for breathing
The US is really keen on disproving any claims of labour aristocracy huh
I was under the impression many people just don’t pay hospital bills?
That’s what I’d probably do
Just dont pay the bill
-1000 credit score checkmate tankie
I think you can renegotiate the bill and do really low monthly payments if you end up in that situation
Tho now that you mention it I don’t think Ive ever noticed my credit score being affected much by the medical bills I never payed
Nice I’m glad it’s working out for you
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It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances. Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.
I think it’s more to do with the general sense of no future worth continuing that people have, and a cultural attitude of hating kids that seems to have built up in western countries. People didn’t hate children 30 years ago the same way they hate children today. Children were a part of everyday life outdoors on every street, you really didn’t do well in the world if you got mad about kids every time you saw them because outside of school hours they were omnipresent outdoors.
Oh yeah, one thing about fertility rates going down is because Teen pregnancies are way down
That doesn’t explain the general trend because they’ve always been a relatively low proportion of births.
Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.
I think it’s more that families that have been poor for generations know how to raise kids on a budget but people who grew up middle class don’t want to have kids unless they can offer them roughly the same quality of life they had, which is increasingly inaccessible.
I feel like all life advice in “the middle class” is like… Don’t have kids until you have an established career, mortgage, and can afford a babysitter/daycare.
That’s not to say the modern situation is entirely caused by that. One thing I thought of is if you’re a peasant, kids might not actually be that helpful in the field but you can keep an eye on your kids fucking about while you plow fields or whatever. Once urbanisation and bosses happen, you can’t just bring your kid into the office while you make sales calls (unless your child is also losing fingers in the textile factory). Modern farms are also different to older farms; you don’t really want your kids to be around heavy machinery too much, though farmers kids I know spent a decent amount of time hanging out with their parents in the combine harvester etc (unlike literally every urban worker I know).
The survey answer of global hopelessness feels a bit post-hoc to me. I know its a popular narrative, but many doomed societies that have felt doomed have had very high birthrates.
Individualism is also another one.
It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances.
The survey posted is literally showing that it is the primary reason. And it didn’t ignore your concerns:
Nearly a quarter (23%) of Millennials and Gen Z without children do not plan to become parents, primarily due to financial reasons. Furthermore, 31% of Millennials and Gen Z who say they don’t plan to become a parent attribute this to the social and political world their children would inherit.
The idea that the world is so hopeless it would be wrong to bring kids into it is real, but it is absolutely not the primary reason. Unless you have a source that says otherwise.
I think it’s more to do with the general sense of no future worth continuing that people have, and a cultural attitude of hating kids
Yeah, while finances are an issue i agree its more that sense that the future will be worse. Blaming finances is easier, not just to communicate but also for people to wrap their minds around without having to confront the dread of the future if things continue the way they are.
Part of me feels the hatred of children and antinatalism in general is a reaction to people not being able to afford kids/feeling there’s no future for children of their own. The way antinatalists speak, there has to be something more there
Agreed. I’ve been a teacher before and I don’t hate kids. So I think the problem is that “I hate kids” is more of a lie we tell ourselves because we cannot in good conscience have kids.
There’s also the fact that the onus is always on women, so we know this is a proxy for something else. If more kids was that much of a priority the bourgeoisie would make some concessions in order to get it. They’d allow more building in “prime real estate” walkable cities and introduce the idea of “community” to America. They’d take a hit on their rent prices and let young people move to the walkable cities they yearn for so they can actually meet people, and you know, get laid to have kids.
But no, their idea is that they want to mandate that women reproduce or be tossed in jail, and further hammer in the idea for men that if they don’t get laid by age 30 they’re a hopeless loser.
If more kids was that much of a priority the bourgeoisie would make some concessions in order to get it.
They are making about as much concession as for mitigating climate change, so they are consistent.
men that if they don’t get laid by age 30 they’re a hopeless loser.
hey, that’s me. already 34 in fact.
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The way antinatalists speak, there has to be something more there
They don’t want to change diapers, I think
Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.
People are poorer now than 10 years ago, but fertility rate hasn’t gone up.
And it’s declined the most among Black and Native Americans and least among Asian Americans
It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances. Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.
The Global South has a higher birth rate than the imperial core. I don’t think it has anything to do with finances at all. Are Congolese artisanal miners and Bangladeshi sweatshop workers somehow more financially secure than some software developer living in the West?
The conditions of child rearing are so socially and economically different in the impoverished global south versus the imperial core that there’s no way to isolate those variables.
And as I’ve said elsewhere, the headline isn’t conjecture. It’s the answer people gave to a survey. When asked why they aren’t having kids, young Americans say finances are the primary reason.
Doing my part for white replacement by not reproducing
Capitalism continuing to destroy its own foundation lol
I know a lot of people who want to have kids (or more than one kid) who won’t because it would financially ruin them, and I live in a cheap ass rust belt city.
Unlike me who won’t have kids due to no game
For some of us, it’s both
Yep.
Personally, I got slapped with the ugly + picky employers means I’m underemployed + live in a podunk suburb so can’t meet people wombo combo.
White, married, make ~$160k/yr combined (pretax). No kids, vasectomy. Climate change and the complete lack of pro-natal infrastructure in our society is why. No nearby family to rely on, and by the time we finish our 8 hour days, neither of us has the energy to prepare a meal and care for a child. I don’t really love being alive and I’d have a lot of regret bringing in someone to a worse world and make them deal with that feeling every day
im sure the right wing youtubers will be crying and pissing themselves about the “infertility crisis” even louder now
They’ve been virtue signalling about concern for population growth for years now
I mean, ya know…
Dats one reason I guess.
Seriously.
I refuse to raise any kid outside of a walkable city, even if they paid me to stay in podunk suburbia and gave me a house for free I wouldn’t have a kid. Raising anyone here would practically feel like abuse.
They’re still pumping them out in Guatemala. I’m pretty sure we’re one of the countries keeping up North America’s birthrates.
