In the U.S., birth rates fell pretty much continuously for at least 150 years until WWII and the Baby Boom. Now they are slightly declining again. Many industrialized nations have a similar graph.

So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.

This is really the message of Abundance.

If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.

We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.

This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.

I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about postponing children. People back then probably would think delaying it was unnatural and this really wasn't that long ago.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...

[2]: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...

This is a real thought process people are contending with. There's also just the simple fact that kids are liabilities more so than assets. That's not been the case through most of human civilization.

I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.

Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct.

However, one big caveat:

"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"

What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.

That context established:

The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.

The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.

This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.

Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.

There is the idea floating around in Europe, to nullify people’s student debts if they have children.

So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.

I do hope that will be put into effect.

I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.

I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.

Agree and there are many reasons more.

I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.

We're also teaching the younger generation imminent climate apocalypse is coming, and therefore bringing kids into this dying world would be cruel, or at best contributing to the problem.

(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)

This is exactly it.

It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.

It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.

Take an average 22-year old. Tell them they just won the lottery, and never have to worry about money ever again. Do you think they'll be interested in starting a family?

So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?

I agree. It comes down to the opportunity cost for women to have babies.

On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.

Even wealthy nepo people wait until then to have kids. A big part of it is also societal expectations. Going out every weekend clubbing is seen as fine in your 20s. Even if that specifically isn't your thing, you probably are filling your time with something personally gratifying.

Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.

There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.

I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.