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DinoNerd's avatar

You should probably also mention ever-increasing standards for child rearing, particularly in countries like the US, making merely "adequate" provision for one's children increasingly expensive in both time and money.

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Geoff Graham's avatar

Some additional/related explanations/thoughts:

1) Atomization of the extended family and post-industrial familial diaspora makes it more difficult to have proximate child rearing assistance that is truly loving, so having children has become more intimidating and therefore less desirable.

2) Childhood mortality has plummeted. The trend chart of childhood mortality looks almost exactly like the trend chart of fertility. In ye olden days, to be sure that enough of your children would survive that they would have enough children to survive, etc, you had to have a LOT of children. At least a few of the children you brought into the world needed to bring children of their own into the world for you to be confident that your genes would live on. For you to have three children become parents, you needed to have at least four or five be born, and even if you had that many, there was a decent chance you'd lose most of them, so you really needed to have seven or more to be reasonably confident that three might someday have children of their own. Nowadays, literally 99% of children born survive to adulthood, so if you have just one child, the pressure to have more has meaningfully evaporated.

3) School pushes back age of marriage for everyone, including women, and a woman's age at marriage is an exceptionally good predictor of how many children she'll have. I am an example: I am the youngest of four, my mother got married at 21, had her first child at 23, and her last at 33.

P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮

P.P.S. Your point about evolution/the Amish is a good one. The future belongs to those who show up. Antihumanists are least likely to have children. Pronatalists are most likely to have them.

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