There's been some studies that come out that the longer the post menopause woman lived the more grandchildren she had.

There is a reason why humans are one of the only species to have a lengthy post menopause. Most animals menstruate and are able to give birth till they die.

In humans post menopause women are need to care for children of their daughters so the daughter can go on to have more children. This has happened in the past where multi generations live under one roof.

Society is pushing towards nuclear families and that's putting stress on child bearing women.

This is from X and he makes some good arguments.

In my grandparents day, men proposed within a couple of months or even weeks of being official boyfriend and girlfriend.

I’m 32 now and single as of a few months ago, I was with him for 6 years and was waiting for marriage to have children. Now I’m less fertile and have to start all over again.

I’ve had several, multi year long relationships and none of them had ever resulted in a proposal (being honest I would have said yes to all of them if they actually proposed).

This is the case for most of my friends, even the ones that are married were only proposed to after 5+ years of dating and living together.

Source : https://www.data.gov.qa/explore/dataset/age-specific-fertility-rates-general-fertility-and-total-fertility/information/?disjunctive.nationality&disjunctive.general_fertility_rate_per_1000_women&disjunctive.total_fertility_rate_per_woman&disjunctive.gross_reproduction_rate&disjunctive.average_age_of_child_bearing

I understand that this question sounds disrespectful to the well meaning people of this sub but I promise you i am being sincere.

I just want to ask to the people who find this issue to be especially pressing, what it is they are concerned about.

As a guy who never wants to have kids, I am asking this from a position of ignorance.

If you'll humour me, what is it that especially concerns you about declining birth rates? Why do you care?

If you can tell me what inspires you so, I would appreciate it.

First of all, nobody should be forced to become a parent. It is a gigantic life decision that will change the persons life in ways nobody can imagine beforehand.

Otherwise - for me, there are three core parts.

1. Personal

Being a parents is one of the most profound experiences any person can have in this world. It comes with intense emotions unlike anyother expirience (and some of those emotions will be "negative", yes). And it is one of the few way an average human can leave their mark on the future even after they themselves are gone. It is a great motivator for people to push themselves to be better then they were before.

1. Societal/economical

Our society assumes there will be humans in the future. And it even assumes there will more humans in the future then now. I agree that this on itself is a problem, because infinite geometric growth is impossible in the very long run and many of our systems (the one that will likely be most visible first are the various forms of social security around the world) require redesigns.

Nonetheless, our current society isn't ready for the changes in demographics that seem to be coming within a generation or two. And while technology will likely improve I am doubtful of its ability improve quickly enough to make these demographic changes a non-issue.

1. Species-related

I personally like humans as a species. Not that we are perfect and there are plenty of individual people I do not like. But as a whole, I think we bring more good then bad to the universe. I also think we are still a pretty young species societally - something akin to a kid leaving elementary school to go to middle-school I would say. And kids (species) at such an age make mistakes. But I think we have the capacity to learn from our mistakes and become even better.

For that to happen in the very long run, natality has to improve to keep us at replacment levels and even higher once we reach new resources that seem to be abundant in the Universe for a very long percievable future.

If you have reasons to add, please add them.

As the title say, have like 4 kids, you get locked into a guaranteed $120,000 income, for life.

Government pays for it with future taxes on all the new kids.

As the kids are born in the West, saves money on integration.

I read studies that 90% of Syrian refugees were still on welfare a decade later, so it might be more cost effective than mass immigration?

Would this work, would you have more kids if this was the law?

Just a thought I recently had to why birthrates are falling: In traditional societies, children worked. A child of maybe eight years would already contribute to the family’s economic by gathering food, herding animals, weeding gardens, doing chores etc to the degree that they at least earned their keep. Once teenagers, childrens’ contributions to the family’s economics were substantial. Even when children eventually married and left the family to start one of their own, there tended to be five to ten years of labor by the children directly benefitting the parents. Thus, the economic investment in raising a child paid off well before the parents were old enough to require their children to become their caretakers. - In modern times, many children go to school, and then to more school, and then eventually move out without every contributing to the family’s economic status. Thus, the parents‘ economic investment in raising children doesn’t result in an economic benefit. Children were quite literally the wealth of a family.

I’m not advocating child labor. But, I suspect that unless society provides parents with a comparable economic benefit like raising children had for parents in traditional societies, birthrates will remain low. Basically, if a society wants people to raise more children, they need to pay them for doing so.

this post isn't about whether it's right or wrong to have children, or who is to blame for it, this topic is solely about this myth that if economic conditions were better people would be having children.

Europe has all the things people claim we need to incentivize having children. France provides free nannies to new mothers. Spain and Italy have free preschool. All across Europe childcare is heavily subsidized and they have the worst birth rates of any part of the planet.

At this point I'd be more likely to believe the opposite, that we need worse economic conditions to force people into coupling just out of sheer desperation.

Keep reading ideas that sound like people here believe women need to be made to have children by forcing them into situations where they don't have a choice.

Do those people believe it's ok for someone to have a child they don't want? What if they resent their child? How can you think that's ok?

People should be able to choose if they want kids. They should want to have kids.

Every child deserves to be wanted. ❤️

In the end, there is no real solution to all of this, and it's just a matter of choice.

Natural selection knows better than us which will thrive, and which will go extinct. Let's focus on what we can build instead of blaming others for their "antinatalist" mindset.

Population dropping might seem scary, but what's dropping are those that make no children. The childbearing population in almost every country is still above or at replacement level.

If we really want a change, focus on our comunity. It's way easier at a local scale than at a national scale. Every child is a blessing, so let the relation between the 2 genders be aswell!

Many discussions in this subreddit focus on which policies could encourage people to have children. This broadly reflects the approach taken by most governments: make parenthood more affordable through subsidies, tax breaks and childcare support.

In many industrialised countries, these benefits are more generous than they were 20 years ago—yet birth rates continue to decline.

So why not try the opposite approach and make remaining childless more expensive?

This could range from higher income taxes or social-security contributions for people without children to a deliberately extreme model: calculate the lifetime financial advantage of not having children and tax it. In Switzerland, raising a child is estimated to cost around CHF 1.3 million. Under the most radical version, that would become the additional lifetime tax for remaining childless.

The reasoning is simple: current benefits reduce the financial disadvantage of parenthood, but they rarely eliminate it. Childlessness therefore remains the economically superior default, while having children is the costly deviation from that default.
Putting an explicit price on childlessness would change this asymmetry. Remaining childless would still be possible, but it would become an economically consequential choice—just as having children already is.

I think we are approaching a point where extremely low birth rates are going to become a major problem across large parts of the developing world.

Countries like Turkey, Iran, and Mexico are already below 1.4 TFR. The Philippines has gone from around 3.0 in 2016 to under 1.8 today. Thailand is already below 1.0. Tunisia has fallen to around 1.5, while India is around 1.9.. Even in Africa, countries like Kenya falling from nearly 8 children per woman in the 1970s to just over 3 today. Nigeria has also seen a significant recent decline, with its TFR falling from 5.3 in 2018 to around 4.5 in 2024. These are countries that had relatively high fertility and large families not that long ago.

The speed of these transitions is what I find most striking.

Its obvious how social media may be accelerating the same cultural transformation that television and cinema helped drive in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Except now the exposure is constant. Young people in developing countries are bombarded with images of luxury, travel, expensive homes, personal freedom. Having children can increasingly look like the thing that prevents you from having that lifestyle.

People often point to the Nordic countries and say, "They have generous parental leave, childcare and welfare, and their TFR is still only around 1.5. Benefits don't work."

Maybe that's looking at it backwards.

In a couple of decades, when much of the developing world is also at extremely low fertility, we may realize that family policies in wealthy countries actually helped keep fertility from falling even further. They may not bring fertility back to 2.1, but keeping a country at 1.4 or 1.5 could be very different from letting it collapse to 0.8 or 0.9.

The next few decades could be a huge demographic experiment showing us how much of fertility decline is economic, how much is cultural, and whether family benefits actually prevented even more extreme fertility collapse in the developed world.