A new study breaks down the reasons more U.S. adults say they are unlikely to have children.

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Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.

When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.

  • @givesomefucksEnglish
    68•1 month ago

    Not having kids is the only way some of them are gonna be able to afford to live, and less people 30 years from now means they might even be able to afford a place to live if they can retire.

    There’s always fearmongering when populations god down, but historically it’s the only time periods normal people can claw back some wealth from the 0.1%

    Which is why the wealthy always freak the fuck out. They do t care about people, they care about labor supply, and the more people the cheaper labor.

    • @[email protected]English
      24•1 month ago

      Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.

      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity

      The phenomenon of societies having their birth rate fall off as they become wealthier is called the demographic transition.

      And further, that correlation exists across a number of axes:

      • Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).

      • Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).

      • Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here’s the US, and more-generally:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

        Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.

      • @idiomaddict
        9•1 month ago

        Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children.

        That’s why the very wealthy want people to keep having lots of kids. Kids make you more willing to take shit in order to feed them and make you poorer and more dependent on your job. That’s not a bad thing about kids, it’s a good thing about parents, but it also makes parents easier to exploit.

      • @givesomefucksEnglish
        9•1 month ago

        Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.

        Correlation is not causation, there’s no “other way around”…

        But what you’re talking about is the drop in fertility due to industrialization and other periods where children worked less and cost more.

        That’s different than what I’m talking about; when a labor supply shrinks it means workers get paid more.

        That’s just basic supply and demand.

        We’re both right, just talking about different things.

        • @phcorcoran
          5•1 month ago

          I took “rather than the other way around” to mean “rather than negatively-correlated” in this context, since positively was emphasized

    • @FireRetardant
      11•1 month ago

      There is the real issue of how a society will support its aged population with significantly less young people working than in the past. It requires changes to regulations and taxation and many nations arent ready to accept that and instead somehow expect the smaller number of young people to just pick up the slack and accept they won’t get to retire when they age.

        • @FireRetardant
          5•1 month ago

          Yes, i mentioned it requires changes to taxation. A lot of the wealthy are the older so they won’t vote in a way that helps young people, they vote in a way to preserve their wealth, even if it means poor social services for people the same age as them but “poor”.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 month ago

        Robots for care

        maybe giving people the option for an early peaceful end on thier own terms. It was disgusting watching my great grandfather be trapped in his own body for 10 years. What a horror show. Already planned my way out if it looks like im going to be the same.

        Maybe even Basic income for people taking care of elderly family members.

        Or better yet basic income for sahm up to 1st grade. Lol could you imagine the pop increase.

      • @return2ozmaOP
        1•1 month ago

        Just look at Japan. They’re screwed.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•1 month ago

          Maybe if hours reduced to 30 for full time people have more kids. Korea talking about upping hours.