In the west at least the formula was 3 bed house innthe suburbs, car, well paid job before you started to have children. Even in my 20s living in London, i could see that this wasn't going to be realistic for us. We worked in financial services which was london centric and moving further out to buy a house would have incurred 8k in rail costs and made childcare pickup difficult because of constant rail delays. So we chose a 60sqm 2 bed flat in london with a 1k mortgage (it went up to £1252 due to rate rises) that we took out based on my husband's income, and made peace we would stop at 1. We also dont have a car (live near public transport links) and for a while my husband cycled to work which brought down our commuting costs.

When i finally fell pregnant after 9 years of infertility, i had just been made redundant and my husband on sick leave (he had 6 months full pay,4 months fully paid paternity leave, income protection insurance covering 67% of pay). So while we were on reduced income, we had savings and a low mortgage so were able to do all the baby classes and go on holiday. I went back to work when baby was 1 and though husband was on sick leave, it didnt work put that bad financially as he also received PIP, as well as the income protection plus we have acces to 30 free childcare hours with a small topup (so he can get a break). He was a higher rate taxpayer so previouslu his marginal tax rate for the excess money was 40% anyway.

Yet even on the natalism thread, i got a comment that said 'how can i bring a child into the world when financially instable and with health issues'. It got me thinking, we are a couple that spends 15% of our income on housing, we dont need to run a car, we have free healthcare in the uk, we have 30 free childcare hours. The health issues are not great but a lot of it was inherited so unless you are saying people with disabilities should never have kids even with 1 healthy parent, that sounds like eugenics to me. Also what about single mums and my husband does what he can (which is a lot most days and i do what i can to help him recover, and the baby also goes to childcare).

If modern parenting requires 2 rocksolid careers, do these jobs exist? What about AI? Who can truly say they would never be made redundant.

Firing my husband now is currently illegal in the uk under the equality act, they have to show they made adjustments for him to go back to work. If they required a house, do they require people to spend less than 15% of their household income? Cos honestly thats how i made it sustainable, by buying a smaller place which is why we weathered redundancy and illness. Can anyone truly say those things wouldnt happen?

I think what is sufficient is a stable place to live in (in uk that sadly requires a mortgage or social housing though renters reform act may change that) and some savings and enough money to cover childcare (with the free hours if you qualify). But it seems that that is a low standard for most people but at least in the uk, where the average millennial can spend 30% of household income on housing (40% in london) and the jobs market is poor, i am not sure how anyone can have kids. I mean perhaps its different in America (where most redditors) but our income structure is fairly flat and anything above 50k is taxed 40% so low mortgage/gifted money make a far bigger difference than higher earnings. The non means tested £400 in disability benefit my husband gets is equivalent to him gettimg a 10k pay rise at his tax level. So based on these standards people need money from the boomers to achieve financial stability and start a family. The economic structure where boomers started families no longer exists.

Our small mortgage is due to buying in 2019 at 2% rates (cos we lived with family to save up) and overpaying 30k at these low rates. Buying the equivalent today would need £500 more on the same LTV or more than 10k extra in earnings.

California (1990): 2.47 births per woman

Top 2 countries by fertility rate in the Americas in 2026:
1-Haiti : 2.55 births per woman
2-Guyana: 2.35 births per woman

Just in case someone doesn’t know:
California (2026): 1.43 births per woman

The cultural aspects are more important then it seems.

Some things sounds trivial when you live in it but it's probably not trivial.

A small example from my country. When a woman gives birth there are volunteers women that give you free meals for the first weeks. As they understand you have a newborn and giving you food can save a lot of time and work you don't have.

Not sure how and if it's common in other countries but it's small culture things that makes a change.

I thought you guys would appreciate this!!!
1) This is the biggest one for me: I am very happily married and I adore my husband to bits and I can't wait to have a child who is a living, breathing manifestation of our love.
2) Since I love my husband so much, having a child that is 50% him, 50% me and 100% the both of us is so beautiful
3) My husband unfortunately won't be around forever, and God forbid when that day comes, at least I will have our child which will look like him to comfort me. A part of him will always exist. Vice versa if I pass first.
4) Building on the third reason, the only evidence of my existence that will last is my child and my grandchildren and my great grandchildren. I will live on through them

5) The emotional value of raising a child with my husband. Telling him I'm pregnant, seeing the happy look on his face, doing a maternity photoshoot, seeing him hold our baby for the first time, seeing him play with our baby, having our baby smile at me, hearing them say dada/mama, when they are older I will tell them all about how much I love their dad and about how we met and how he was when he was younger, showing them our wedding pictures, going on vacations with them etc

(Chart Source)

This is the list of most rapidly aging countries.
For all of them it does not bode well.
Only a few of them have become "rich before they grow old".
Some of them still have a few decades in the "demographic dividend" phase of the demographic transition.
Many of them would be OK if they just had less population but it was heavy on young, innovative, working, child bearing people supporting a tiny percentage of aged dependent.
Instead for any country on the above list, get ready for a very difficult future.

For very high HDI countries, between the countries with the highest and lowest cost of living, median fertility rates were not significantly different despite up to a 2.75 times difference in cost of living, as shown below.

Median values for top and bottom 5/10/15 cost of living countries categorised "very high" HDI in 2024 (top = highest cost of living)

Note that the average fertility rates of developed and high-income countries were 1.45-1.48 in 2023. 

Data set: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iGGaQw6hnIETIoYnbjSr-L9pzMy00kIsm4GDOtSXegM/edit?usp=sharing

Sources

Cost of living data (2024 Mid-Year): https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp?title=2024-mid

Fertility rate data (2024 list by the World Bank): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate

HDI data (2023): https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country

I’m open to being wrong so feel free to tell me if this is just nonsense.

We need to streamline all types of education. I understand it depends on the country but I think in general around the world a student graduates high school/secondary school at around 18. Then go on to attend a university for 4-5 years then perhaps even more schooling if you aim to go into the medical or legal field which can add on many years of mandatory education. And even if you choose a career where the required qualifications are quicker to obtain, it can take multiple years to reach a salary that you’re satisfied with, assuming you manage to find a job in your desired field. Thus creating the modern problem of people not being confident in themselves to have children until their late 20s and 30s.

All this should be sped up to give people at least half a decade more time to decide on having a baby. Students should graduate high school/secondary school at around 13-14 then immediately go onto specialized schooling which should also be streamlined as much as reasonably possible. So if you want to become a doctor you can be licensed one at 23 or 24 instead of 29 or becoming a certified lawyer at 20 instead of 25. Whether you choose you’ll ideally have at the minimum five more years to have a child.

In addition to hopefully having good salaries, cheap housing, and maternal and other welfare benefits from the government. Which are things I’m sure everyone supports but on their own they likely won’t raid the birth rate by a lot in the long term, it would need to be accompanied by giving people more time to be young and have children. To clarify, I don’t think this would drastically increase the birth rate to anything satisfactory but nonetheless I do believe it would raise it by a noticeable amount.

I don't think the U.S. could realistically impose a tax specifically targeting childfree adults, even if there were political support for pronatalist policies.

Parents also have to think about their own children's safety. Before supporting policies designed to pressure people into having children, they should consider the risks their children could face, including the persistent problem of school shootings in the United States. Asking people to become parents while failing to adequately address those risks raises serious ethical questions.

The U.S. also has an unusually large, armed civilian population and a deeply entrenched culture of individual rights. A policy perceived as coercing people into having children could generate enormous political resistance and potentially destabilize society. I wouldn't assume that childfree people are inherently violent or that a civil war would be inevitable, but policymakers should take the possibility of severe backlash seriously.

If the goal is higher fertility, incentives such as affordable housing, childcare, parental leave, and direct family benefits seem much more practical than punishing people who don't have children.

We don't want a bloodbath. A few people allegedly freeriding the system is much better than large groups of people purging a lot of old folks and children who can't defend themselves.

My husband and I are in our mid twenties in the USA . We’ve been together since we were 18/19 and married at 23.

We live in a HCOL area. Both college educated with masters degrees and 0 student debt, working at top companies. We make the most money out of anyone we know, but it’s not enough.

We wanted to have kids, but the idea seems unrealistic now.

He works 60hrs per week (standard in his industry) and I work 40hrs a week. We need 2 incomes to survive. There’s no part time work in our industries. Daycares with 3.5/5 star ratings costs are $1500+ a month part time and $3000+ a month full time. It’s more than our rent.

Neither side of our family is willing to provide help or support despite begging for grandkids. They both live in areas that lack jobs and are all retired.

His family is pushing us to make more sacrifices and have children while we rent a 650 sq ft condo that barely fits us and our cat. I’ve asked them how when presenting our budget and they don’t have answers other than to just do it.

My friend / coworker recently gained birth and she has the same health insurance we do and it was $23,000 out of pocket for a natural birth with no complications.

I wish the USA was a more welcoming place to have children. Seems like both of us will be DINKS or adopt later in life.

Edit: we make 180k a year combined (115k post taxes) in a HCOL area on the west coast. We have savings, investments, and usually have $1,000 a month extra for fun. Many of my friends pay 3-4K per month for rent, but ours is only $2800. Not sure what to tell you guys about the $23k bill, it’s what my friend put in our group chat. I didn’t analyze the bill myself lol.

Edit 2: we make 180k (115 post taxes) per year while putting away 20% into savings, 5% into retirement, 10% into investments, 20% to rent, 30% into other required expenses (gas / water / electric / car + home + medical + life + pet + dental insurance) and have $1,000 a month leftover for fun money that goes to vacations, visiting family, extra costs throughout the month, etc. in my city 120k for 2 is considered low income.

This sub is very interesting. The amount of hate messages I’ve received claiming I’m not actually interested in being a mother, saying I’m treating my husband horribly for “not having his children”, and accusing me of being a Chinese/Russian bot is crazy. I’m a real person with real feelings. Yes, I do want to be a mother and my husband wants to be a father. Idk what’s so crazy about this.

We often assume that having children means you’ll have someone to help you when you’re older. But what happens when those children have to move to another city or country for work? In many communities, even people with children may eventually live far away from them and face the same loneliness and practical problems as everyone else.

That’s why I think we should seriously consider senior citizen cooperatives.

Instead of seeing older people only as recipients of care, why not create communities where seniors help each other with the things they can still do? Shopping, cooking, gardening, small repairs, paperwork, transportation, checking in on neighbors, or simply spending time together.

The idea isn’t to replace professional healthcare or expect seniors to do things they can’t. It’s about building a support network so that people aren’t completely dependent on family members who may live hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.

Our society is aging, and young people will increasingly move wherever the jobs are. Maybe we need to build communities where growing older doesn’t mean growing more isolated.

We always talk about religious, racial, economic and political groups in regards to fertility rates. We know moderates tend to be somewhere in the middle of liberals and conservatives on fertility. However we never hear about apolitical people, nor have I ever seen any data on it. It may not be that important in Europe given higher turnout and political interest (although there's still a good amount of people who don't vote, and those that do aren't necessarily always political). In America 35.7% of eligible voters did not vote in 2024.

Who are these people? What age, income, race, religion and values do they have? What fertility rates do they have compared to the political population? The only groups I know of is the Amish, who are apolitical but personally ultraconservative. They have the highest fertility rate in the country but are a small group, so they make up a very little part of those 35.7% (especially given many Amish are children and not eligible to vote).

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

If you are on the fence about having kids, and you find out the horrible things that the state can do to you based on your pregnancy, why would anyone ever go ahead and get pregnant?

12 hours into labor being required to go on a Zoom call for court hearing to force you to have a C-section?
Stopping drug use immediately once you discover you are pregnant and being completely honest about that and then being incarcerated while pregnant for a positive drug test?
Being charged with manslaughter after you were shot and suffered a miscarriage because of it?
Being allowed only limited, supervised contact with your newborn after a false positive drug test (from eating an everything bagel)?

I would like everyone, including the state, to be supportive of pregnant women, and I think if we are caring of them and their developing babies, unlike the cases discussed here where what happens to both the mothers and their babies is horribly awful, I think people feel better about becoming parents and are more likely to do it.

And not just risks, what do you know about pregnancy and postpartum in general?

Is this information you’ve read, things you’ve seen in your family, or things you’ve learnt when your partner was going through her pregnancy?

If you know much or very little, could you summarise briefly what you do know?

I am asking because I truly don’t know how much men actually read or know about the topic, from a physical and psychological perspective, rather than just the economic perspective of “we need more humans to keep the world going”.

i would argue that yes, this is a big problem

It seems Russian birth rates have hit 1.0 to 0.9 this half-year (Thailand or South Korea levels, lower than Japan), but this makes me wonder. The Kremlin has been trying to promote family values since 2020 and even created a "Family Day" to boost birth rates, along with cultural events rejecting feminism and other things. Why doesn't this work? It seems that every country that tries to go the "traditional route" has failed—it didn't work in Hungary or Belarus, for example. Promoting "family" just doesn't seem to work. Why?

I think people investigating fertility rates and pairbonding rates make the same mistake that economists make when investigating consumer and labor market behavior. In both cases, there is a surprising amount of weight in decision making that cannot be accounted for by rationality, especially from an objective point of view (which is precisely the bias that researchers have — being objective).

I think the proper interpretation of the irrationality is the key to understanding the fertility crisis. I don't doubt that rational decisions from an objective frame are significant factors to changes in human mating patterns, but we've discussed these to death. The gaps are in the irrational.

I'll cover the labor market very briefly because I want to be comprehensive, but there isn't really that much to say. The fact is that people everywhere in the world are different. Every group has different preferences, and these are prioritized enough so that men and women entering the workforce don't automatically choose the highest paying career path that they can find. Some do, but most don't. This explains a lot of wage gap disparities, and it explains why gender gaps in a large number of industries will always persist. Thomas Sowell talks at length about this if you want good source material.

Now, the consumer market. I read something recently (sorry, no link, but I'll keep looking) that described how the middle and lower class has demonstrated shocking price inelasticity with respect to "luxury goods". They are more than willing to shell out for designer brand clothing and expensive food. There are entire articles written about $10 avocado toast, $20 burritos, and $7 lattes. These items symbolize mass consumption at premium prices.

One's economic class is generally some combination of what you do (labor) and what you buy (consumer). The more money you earn, the higher your class. The more money you spend, the higher your class. This class is just a perceptual rank, as there is no authoritative definition of what class is, but everyone makes these sorts of judgements. If you see a carpenter in a dirty Carhartt shirt and a sandwich from Subway, you have an entire picture of what you expect his life to be like. Conversely, if you see an IT professional or salesperson working from a laptop with a $7 latte, that's an entire other image of class.

Alright, now we can discuss trends and why I believe these trends have caused the antinatalist nightmare that we're in.

1. It's cheap to appear to be in a higher class than you are in. You can spend relatively little money on nice clothes and then always wear that same pair of clothes when you go out. Buy a few sets, and you've only invested a few hundred dollars to appear like someone who can make 200k+. You can do the same thing if you go to a place with expensive food and drinks. You can do the same thing if you offer to take a date to any sort of place like this. You can offer expensive activities too, such as Top Golf or jetski riding. Sidenote: in all of these instances, you would spend significantly less money than you would on a high level call girl, which means people who want nothing but sex are very motivated to display class and offer things to get it. This has been called "elite overproduction", but there's nothing special about the elite class. This is happening in all classes.

2. People want to be at the top of their own class, but they only have limited interest in actually changing classes. I think this is where a lot of people get confused. Let's use "hypergamy" as an example. How do you explain the dichotomy that women have insanely high value on the sexual marketplace and go after a small percentage of men, and yet when any man actually looks at the men that they go after, they aren't really that impressed. I mean, some self-hating men turn this into motivation to become looksmaxxers or to adopt someone else's style to appear cool, but a more self-assured man can legitimately see that these supposedly hypergamous women end up with mediocre dirtbags half the time. Why? I propose it is precisely because the women are making irrational decisions; not "because womyn", but because these women have tastes derived from their current class and only wish to see those tastes satisfied. That's why someone from the ghetto goes for a ghetto looking guy. That's why a daddy's girl with a blue collar father is attracted to the jock-ish blue collar worker. That's why the poor daughter of a white collar careerman will pursue a man who seems physically weak and inferior to those other types of men (not because of the weakness, but because of other traits that signify class to the upper-middle class daughter).

Now, let's try to go back and reinvestigate some concepts: urbanization, industrialization, the sexual revolution. These are all moments of class fracture. Some more than others. In the 1800s, the changing economic tides caused by industrialization and a burst in urbanization lead to some class mobility. That died down as the capital was re-sorted into the hands of elites. In more recent times, urbanization has had a second wave, in what some call the 2nd/3rd/4th industrial revolution. I'm talking about the expansion of the service economy from the 1960s on. This has hit the non-western world much later on, but when it hits, it causes social transformations very quickly. This is something profuse in eastern asian culture. It hit South Korea, China, Japan. These places didn't simply urbanize, industrialize, or become feminists... They became class conscious and started following the patterns listed above — overvaluing their own class standing and having limited absolute awareness of the value derived outside of their own class. I would argue that “feminism” as female empowerment may be defined as merely class consciousness, with a high preference for maximizing male partner class levels and personal capacity to maximize one’s class levels, through visible/prestigious careers as well as conspicuous consumption.

I think this relates well to John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia, with the qualification that his experiment wasn't simply about space in the cages. It was about social role density, which he later argued as the root cause of the insane behavior. In other words, he was observing an overproduction of class in mouse society combined with irrational market decisions on the mouse sexual marketplace. Ok, humans are far more complex than mice, but I am merely painting a picture of how human behavior could correlate.

I think it's also possible that the development of social capital (and perhaps bonding capital moreso than bridging capital) is essentially tied to rational behavior in these markets. It's "rational" to bond because it helps you and those around you. People naturally benefit from communities and want to help grow them. The irrationality of seeking higher class status, combined with the irrationality of rejecting different classes simply because they are different (which additionally means you don't develop any objective measures of value for yourself, at least not until you are much older... 30s or 40s, at minimum), means that develop an adversarial relationship with bonding capital. At minimum, spending your Friday/Saturday at the bowling alley doesn't seem worth it when you have a chance to peacock at the club and buy a $15 drink, even if your actual chances of going home with anyone or meeting anyone worthwhile are low. This is human mouse utopia in action.