Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.

Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!

> Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children.

Oh you still need them for all of those. It just so happens that developed capitalist countries figured out you can use immigrant's children for this, rather than paying to grow them in-house, since with outsourcing children you bypass a large chunk of the cost.

Developed countries already sold their own children's futures in exchange for short term equity gains, now it's being done to countries where outsourcing happens.

Capitalism is eating fertility.

> Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.

Aye, agreed. It will swing back one way or another.