My sister in law lost a friend, because when they were in their very early twenties, her friend got knocked up by a boyfriend, and when she told my SIL her reaction was “Oh no, what are you going to do?” and the friend thought her reaction should have been “congratulations, I’m so happy for you”.
After a shotgun wedding, the couple moved in with the dad’s parents (so they had plenty of support). But within a couple of years they were divorced and the friend was in rehab. Not before they brought a second child into the world, though.
From what I know, the dad is doing the best he can by those kids, and still has support from his parents. And to an extent, from the mom’s parents. So that’s good, at least.
I want to say from everything you’ve posted here, you are a great parent; and great parents who had challenging childhoods are some of the most inspirational people to me.
This is another of those things that makes sense, but probably isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Making sure the gifted kids are challenged enough so they can experience having to work at something is way more important.
No need to be patronising.
Obviously I don’t think saying it’s bad for society and for many individuals that they aren’t having kids is going to persuade anyone. I said it because I think it’s true. I wasn’t trying to persuade people to have kids in that post. I have done that, when a woman on Reddit asked for advice, and then I didn’t say “trust me, sis”; I tried to describe what is so great about it (which was hard, because it’s mostly intangible, very personal stuff).
The point I was trying to make by relating my own personal experience is that it’s not true that people just rationally don’t want kids, and it is somehow unethical to try to change that. Because we live in a society, and the messaging from that society makes a big difference - and in ours it is excessively negative about childrearing, with the hard parts and risks emphasised, and the benefits and good parts ignored or downplayed. That was my experience, and I see other people believing the same things I did. They’re making a decision based on this unbalanced messaging.
And as well as that, we can and should make practical changes to better support parents, because it can easily be the right decision in some circumstances and not others.
An activity like that is no problem to try and give up. If someone tries axe throwing and doesn’t like it, no big deal. They just don’t go back. But having children is a life-long commitment. It’s all encompassing. Some people can’t handle the stress and turn to drugs or alcohol. Some people walk away from their kids. Some marriages can’t handle the additional stress and break up. Having kids can have serious consequences for the parent. If the person isn’t on board with being a parent, it can be a big negative.
One comparison I think about sometimes is being in the military. For some people, being in the military gives them a huge sense of accomplishment and happiness. For other people, being in the military would be like hell on Earth. Some people have the personality to be in the military, some don’t. If someone didn’t have the right personality and was convinced to try it by those people who loved being service members, that person might hate it, but they would have options to get out in a relatively short time. That’s not the same with kids. Even if the parent walks away, the kid may have serious emotional issues from being abandoned. For those kinds of reasons, I don’t think people should be convinced to have kids if they don’t want them.
Thank you, that is very meaningful to me. I’ve been feeling bad about my Mom lately.
Her situation was complicated by the fact that I was conceived by date rape. She didn’t really see it as rape at the time, she ended up marrying the guy, he was extremely abusive, and it was a very short marriage. But I think that sense of injustice stayed with her. She almost put me up for adoption, they even had me matched with a family, but she couldn’t do it.
I felt reasonably confident I could succeed as a parent, the fear kind of kicked in more after I had a kid and I was having all these feelings. Anger was a hard one. I had a real difficult time experiencing anger toward my kid. But we got it sorted. I really just needed a therapist to tell me, “People get mad at their kids all the time. It’s fine.”
My Mom and me didn’t have a great personality match. She was an engineer with, I’m beginning to think, autistic traits, super regimented and organized and exacting. I am the most head-in-the-clouds creative touchy-feely ADHD person you could think of. She was math, I wasn’t just writing, I was fiction. I never really felt I could relate to her.
I find my son very relatable. Not in the math genius part, but the insatiable love of learning part, the silliness and creativity, the constant chatter, the emotional tenderness and affection, he happens to be a great fit for our family. And I’m sure I would love him even if he weren’t, but it helps, you know? It helps that I have literally the best kid I could ever have.
And that’s another aspect where you just have no control.
Well… maybe you might think that, but I’m under no illusion that everyone is like me, or that everyone will like what I like.
Here’s the thing - your posts here, while I think well-intentioned, are the sort of thing that are a big turn-off to people who are either unable to have children (they really don’t want to be reminded that they’re “missing a great experience” - do you go up to someone in a wheelchair and tell them that dancing is the greatest thing and they’re missing a great experience because they can’t?) or who might have very valid reasons not to reproduce that are, to be frank, none of your business
(Upon discovering a very nasty gene that can result in sudden death at any age whatsoever with no warning, and even if it doesn’t will eventually require the person to either have a heart transplant or die several members of my family who were tested and found to have that gene chose NOT to reproduce due to the 50/50 chance of passing that gene on. Which to my mind is a perfectly valid reason to forgo having children. One of those people has since had children but ONLY because they and their partner were able to afford reproductive assistance to avoid gestating an affected child, but so far they are the only ones able to afford that sort of gene-scrubbing for the next generation. As just one example. Choosing not to pass on a serious gene-based problem to the next generation seems to me to be an entirely reasonable, thoughtful, and beneficial choice if it is, in fact, freely chosen.)
My late husband and I were not able to have children. Well, we decided that we would have a great life even if we did not have that particular experience. Having people tell me I was missing the greatest thing ever, and that I wasn’t complete unless I had kids, and so on was neither welcome nor appreciated nor painless. You don’t know why someone is childless (unless they choose to tell you). Going on and on about how they’re missing something can be downright painful to such a person.
Then again, I look at one of my sisters who buried both her sons before they reached 30. Parenthood started out as a wonderful thing for her but now she’s an angry, bitter, resentful woman consumed by grief that has lasted decades and likely will never go away in her lifetime. Parenthood is not a wonderful thing for her. I don’t know if she would have been happier to never have kids, but the pain of losing them and outliving both of them by decades is very much making her unhappy now.
Well, that’s at least three of us who got that from your post…
What’s the misunderstanding?
You’re saying you started having kids late and regretted not starting sooner and that other people should have kids and start early… without regard to WHY people might not have kids, might not be able to have kids, might not want kids. Seems pretty clear to me you meant everyone should make the same choice you did but sooner in life and if they don’t they’ll regret it and be unhappy.
It’s basically a person telling people that if they don’t make the same choice(s) that person did they’re wrong and screwing up their lives forever.
I don’t think @DemonTreeintended that but that is, in fact, how it is coming across to me. Especially since, as I noted, my partner was not able to have children and we had our reasons for not seeking alternatives such as adoption. Reasons that are, frankly, absolutely no one’s business other than ours and that we don’t have to share with anyone.
Well, it’s not true that the reasons people choose not to have kids are totally rational, any more than it’s true that the reasons people do choose to have kids are totally rational.
I think you might be somewhat overestimating the one-sidedness of the societal pressures on childrearing, though. There are ways in which society is excessively negative about parenthood, true, but also ways in which society is excessively positive, or at any rate somewhat coercively normative, about it. E.g., telling women in particular that they need marriage and family to be truly fulfilled, treating non-parenthood as automatically immature and selfish, etc.
In both directions, ISTM, focusing on criticism and disapproval is not the way forward. There are lots of different ways for individuals to lead happy and socially constructive lives, and ISTM that if we give all of them opportunity and support, individuals on average will do a pretty good job of picking what they want.
So, I think the “ethicality” issue about changing people’s minds on not wanting kids depends on exactly what you mean by “try to change that”. If you mean that we should try to reduce the functional barriers in society to aspiring parents being able to afford and care for kids, yes, absolutely we should.
If you mean that we should be pushing the message that non-parents don’t really understand what’s best for them and are making irrational life choices based on anti-natalist cultural propaganda, then nah, I don’t think that message sounds particularly ethical or particularly effective.
(It’s also not totally honest about the fact that, as I noted, there’s also a lot of pro-natalist cultural propaganda floating around in our societal messaging. Look at our Vice-President’s contemptuous sneering about “childless cat ladies”, to take just one obvious example. Non-parents really don’t need any more blaming and shaming, or scoldy people telling them what’s wrong with their life choices, than they’ve already got.)
A lot of this thread though is about how it is ineffective to try to change that. I think kids are just fun. Sometimes tiring. Sometimes stressful. But funny fascinating and a great excuse to play games and go to a playground. And witnessing that won’t change anyone’s minds.
There is a lot of impact of conforming to what your peers are doing. The best way to get young adults to have kids is to have others of their social group to have kids. The best way to have them not is to have those friends not. Hard to change that though?
Just like when people imagine raising a big family, they instinctively picture a house full of screaming rugrats - whereas the oldest “rugrat” in a family of six might be in her teens by the time the youngest one is born.
There are other important determinants of fertility, most notably the necessity of having sufficient children, sometimes of the male gender depending upon the society, to support you in old age.This effect intensifies under conditions of higher infant, child, and adult mortality. I’ll pass the mike to Elizabeth Wayland Barber via Brad DeLong and Dylan Matthews:
… the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding. That has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today…
You have this biological situation in which one in seven women appears to die in childbirth; in which [to expect] one son surviving, you need to have two kids survive, which means three reach early adulthood, which means four reach the age of 5, which means seven or so babies born, which means nine advanced pregnancies.
Your children’s immune systems are too compromised to fight off the common cold. Maybe you’re too skinny to ovulate. If you aren’t, maybe you lose two teeth and break an arm as the baby leeches calcium out of your body into itself. Then you add on to that the fact that patriarchy means that if you are female, your only durable source of social power is to have surviving sons. And so any temptation to do much of anything other than have surviving sons, and then have more as insurance, is very hard to resist. Those are the biological, ecological, economic forces tending toward patriarchy, of which men as a group then took absolutely horrible advantage.
And yet once technological progress starts to hit 2 percent per year, then some people begin to have incomes above subsistence and infant mortality falls. But those changes came remarkably quickly.
Pick your poison
The problems of underpopulation are self-correcting. Land prices are driven down, making housing cheaper. Old age pension systems collapse, throwing the elderly into poverty and teaching an important lesson on the limits of self-reliance to the next generation. People start planning on having more kids when they can no longer count on social security, medicare, or whatever systems are in place in the particular country.
The same can be said for overpopulation. Ecologists understand that population growth and population crashes are a familiar aspect of eukaryotic life. Technology has only improved the process by adding nuclear conflagration to the mix. The planet will be left with a satisfyingly hygenic surface of molten glass. You take the good with the bad.
It’s great that you have things in common; it makes for a smoother relationship, and it’s nice to be able to share interests. But I think the important thing as a parent is not to try to turn your kid into a mini-you, but support them in developing their own interests, whatever those turn out to be. That’s what I try to do with my daughter, and it sounds like you’re doing that, encouraging your son’s love of maths.
I agree with @Babale , you sound like a great parent.
This would be one of the more practical ways to increase the birthrate. Make it so that the people who want to have kids in the first place have an easier time having kids, and make it easy for them to have large families. Rather than trying to convince people to have kids even if they don’t want to, focus on the people who already have a desire to be parents.
One way the government could help with that is to have tax advantages for having large families. There could be significant tax benefits that increase on a sliding scale the more kids you have. There could be significant tuition grants that also work the same way. There could be mortgage options with very low interest rates for families with lots of children. The government would deliberately take a loss on the tax revenue from that family today knowing that all those kids will be a significant source of tax revenue in the future.
I’m sorry if my posts upset you or anyone else here. That wasn’t my intention. I had been trying to bear in mind that some of the people posting might not have been able to have children, but I forgot to think about it when I was making those comments, especially after I got upset myself at @Kimstu’s post.
However, it’s unfair to compare it to going up to someone in a wheelchair. It’s more like talking about how great dancing is and how you think others are missing out to a roomful of people, some of whom potentially have an invisible disability that prevents dancing. While tact is important and I may well have been lacking in it, this is something we should be able to talk about in general. I wouldn’t go into a conversation on infertility issues and say it, but I shared my story and my conclusions here in this thread because it’s relevant to the topic. (And I think it’s also pretty insensitive to imply someone’s child is making them depressed, even though that presumably wasn’t @Kimstu’s intention.)
Not talking about things that are (generally) good can also harm others. Some people are unable to work, but we still treat having a job as important and necessary for most. You shouldn’t nag someone about unemployment if you don’t know their circumstances, but if they say they don’t get a job because they prefer to sleep and play video games all day, you’re not going to be too impressed.
And I do have some idea why my friends (and some of their relatives) don’t have kids, either because it’s obvious (eg they’re single) or because they’ve told me. But I’m not going around quizzing people about why they don’t have children, or telling everyone they should do so, if that’s what you’re thinking.
And no, I didn’t say everyone should have kids. I specifically said the opposite, that some people are better off not doing so. Nor do I think there are no good reasons not to have any. I was saying that I personally was influenced by negative messages about being a parent, that they turned out not to be accurate, and I think some other people could be similarly negatively influenced.
This is absolutely 100% not true. I think most people, but certainly not all, will be happier having kids, and we should try to build a society that facilitates them doing that with better financial, and especially social support, and by investing in research on fertility. And also that some people are being put off unnecessarily by overly negative messaging, and we should try to change that, too.
This is something that varies by time and place. Most of the other people posting in this thread are closer to my parents’ age than mine, and I get the impression it was a lot more common for marriage and parenthood to be seen as normative and pushed on people, for women to be asked when they were going to have a baby, or told they can’t be happy if they don’t, and similar, in that generation. The comparative lack of such things directed at my generation was likely a reaction to the previous one finding them oppressive. And places/subcultures that still do this a lot are probably disproportionately conservative, and do have higher birth rates.
But this change in attitudes left us with an imbalance, where having children is expected to be a well-considered, affirmative decision, and we still get to hear all about the downsides of having kids, but hear far less about the benefits.
This is a very silly suggestion. I want to change the propaganda. I want parents to talk more about the good parts of having kids, rather than focussing on the hard parts. When someone says cats are better than babies, I want there to be pushback with all the ways babies are better than cats. If they think caring for a baby is hard, they should be reminded that the baby stage really doesn’t last very long. And sure, things don’t always go as planned, but that’s true of everything we do; all of life is a gamble. And I want babies and kids to be better integrated and more visible in society, rather than treated as an inconvenience to be segregated away from adults. That would help parents, too.
I don’t want to bring back nagging, intrusive questions, or scolding people. But I do believe what we hear makes a difference. One of the things that contributed to changing my mind was a thread here on the Dope where parents talked about what they enjoyed about having kids. It was a small thing, but small things add up.
I think it can. It did help to change mine. Yes, it has a bigger impact from peers, though.
Yes. Not super ethical, but maybe governments could bribe popular Instagram and Tiktok influencers in the right age range to have kids?
It does suggest changes can have compounding effects one way or the other, though. So maybe a small intervention could potentially have larger than expected results?
To say “I know this isn’t what you meant to convey, but your language is potentially giving the incorrect impression that this is how you feel” is very different from saying “I think this is how you feel”.
I don’t really see how I could have made that distinction any clearer, but I apologize if my post upset you because the distinction wasn’t clear enough.
It’s selfishly been kind of amazing to learn and relearn stuff alongside him. I forgot how awesome space was. It’s clear he’s going to be a hard science kind of guy.
We have really different brains. Maybe the silliness and affection is as much nurture as nature, because I am hella silly. Our birthdays are close together. We took him to Build a Bear and he got a Pikachu and I got a tardigrade which I named Lewis. Lewis and Pikachu are twins because they were “born” on the same day. He tracks when all his stuffed animals were “born.”
When he first became interested in his “children” I thought, wow, he’s really nurturing. He takes care of his Beep the way you would a baby doll, feeding it, brushing its teeth every night, showering it with praise, etc. Then I realized he was telling his Baby Beep all the things I told him.
I had this moment many moons back where he was climbing onto the school bus and I thought, “All the things I went through in childhood were necessary for me to be the parent this child needs.” I can’t regret or resent any of it, really. I can grieve but I can’t wish it gone, because it made me the mother I am.
Maybe the best pitch for having kids is just being honest about the one you have.
Part of the issue is we are so siloed on the Internet. There are forums for people who want kids but can’t have them, forums for fence sitters, forums for one and done, for people who don’t want kids, for people who are pregnant, for autistic and ADHD kids, for preschoolers, for teens, for every identity imaginable, and people get really enmeshed in that single identity and nobody ever has to talk to anyone else. Meanwhile community life IRL is dying. So there are indeed people talking about how much they love being parents - but they are talking only to other people who love being parents. We have to figure out some way to have a cross dialogue in a way that nobody feels like they aren’t being heard. And that’s tough. Because what I’ve seen online is articles and clickbait clearly intended to pit groups against each other.
Like when Chappel Roan made that comment about how all the parents she knew were in a living hell, that was used very cynically to get people mad. I’ve noticed BuzzFeed is terrible about this. They really facilitate a culture that is incredibly judgemental of parents and negative about parenting. Reddit is also pretty bad, but most of those people are teenagers who are contractually obligated to hate parents.
I got my fertility numbers from wiki upthread and I have a reliability problem. Let’s look at South Korea. I said they have a fertility rate of 0.75. Their cite is “World Population Prospects” by the UN (2025). Scrolling down, there’s another 2024 list by the CIA World Factbook. That gives a fertility rate of 1.17. Big difference. I assume a demographer could explain why. The 2024 (??) CIA data I downloaded says 1.12. I’ll use that last source source below.
The best thing to do depends upon the situation. In an overpopulated world in a country not facing a manageable old age crisis where pollution isn’t taxed sufficiently, one less child is a reason for celebration. Examples include the United States (1.84), France (1.9), New Zealand (1.85), Bermuda and the Isle of Man (1.88). I can’t say the same for South Korea (1.17) or even Italy (1.26).
(If eg China, the US, and EU all taxed carbon emissions at $100 per ton, their citizenry would face no moral quandary when making fertility decision. None of them do this, but the EU is 80% of the way there and the price fluctuates so one of the three big blocks are serious. China’s fluctuating charge was $14.62 last fall, which is higher than the US (zero in most states).) It is reasonably anticipated that a child born in the US will be a super-polluter.
I don’t want to spout WAGs about countries in between (eg UK, 1.63), and I think the conversation here shows that mucking around with population pyramids isn’t sufficient. Serious or semi-serious economic modeling is appropriate. There were a few countries whose fertility rates dropped below replacement during the 1970s - Finland and Germany are 2 examples (1.62 and 1.71) according to the UN population division via wiki, data caveats repeated. So in 20 years we’ll have the tools and the empirics to firmly understand the issue. (Heck, a better grasp is probably a citation away.) Political capacity for adult-like problem solving will vary by country.
I read in the Economist that a large part of the birth rate collapse was due to the decline in teen pregnancy. Reversing that would be unfortunate.
Part of the problem is that existing tax incentives for larger families tend to be very expensive because there is little bang for the buck. I say do more research.
Considering how expensive raising children is, no tax incentive is anything other than cheaping out. And that’s ignoring the non-monetary costs. If your taxes are high enough that a tax incentive makes up the difference, then most likely “people can barely survive because of the crushing taxes” is the real problem. And I’m uncertain if any place on earth has taxes that high.
OK, but that’s how at least three people reading this thread saw your post. I’m not saying you think that, I’m saying that’s how you came across with the way you worded your post.
There’s a very long history of the childless being seen as defective, broken, and lesser, of being pressured to have children, and so on. I’d prefer we not return to those days.
One good thing about living in the present is that in many (though not all) instance we can do something about infertility. However, there are some significant obstacles, including cost. I’d like to see those barriers eliminated, or failing that, greatly reduced so people who want to become parents will be able to.
We do need to speak more frankly of both the positives and negatives of parenthood. We also need to make it clear to young women that biology isn’t fair and they can’t wait as long as men to become parents. Biologically a woman’s best years to give birth are roughly 18-30. That’s not a huge window, but if being a mother is important to a woman that’s when she should ideally be having her kids. I don’t know how to change society to adequately support women making that choice but doing so would probably help with keeping the birth rate at replacement levels.
I completely agree. That sometimes surprises people who know I’m childless, but that ties in with the notion that people who don’t have kids of their own somehow hate kids. I don’t. I like kids. Occasionally people have remarked that crying, fussing, shrieking kids don’t seem to bother me as much as other people. Well, it is annoying but I accept that is part of living in society. People had to put up with my screaming when I was an infant and toddler, I put up with that of new humans when they’re going through that stage. Babies, toddlers, and kids are part of the world, they shouldn’t be segregated and hidden.
