To think all of these people can afford children they just don't want them

I think it can be tricky actually when you earn above average. If you have kids and you are the working poor then top up benefits will largely cover the cost of your child. If your not entitled to help and want to continue work and need f/t childcare then I can see how it’s really challenging financially. I mean £1200-£2000 per month for childcare is a lot. Also kids aren’t mandatory, some of my peers are child free and loving life with their excellent uninterrupted careers, awesome holidays and disposable income. Planning early retirements and second homes in warmer climes. I will be slogging away to put kids through uni and hoping to die quickly in my old age so dc can inherit the house rather than all my hard earned cash going on card homes!

I do love my children but I wouldn’t recommend having children to anyone.

I've found these threads very interesting and not at all goady. It gives me great hope and pleasure to hear the human race is declining.

God why are people so snarky on this site? OP hasn't passed any judgement on people not having children, she's just, saying she thinks they're not being entirely honest - perhaps because of societal/familial pressure, I don't know.

It's a purposely goady thread, there's been loads of them lately. Again, hard not to get defensive.

Sorry If this is difficult for you to understand, with the 'looking after’ term, l’m specifically talking about carers, not all health care workers.Your comment that says ‘not just the ones who changes the sheets’ shows you are indeed a person who wasn’t got a clue, how undervalued carers are.I’m using the word carers because l’m only referring to people, who are care assistants in residential homes, auxiliary staff in hospitals, care assistants working in the community, who do all aspects of care, not social workers, not sure why you’ve mentioned retail staff, hospitality
financial services, which has nothing to do the original point, why would the younger generation choose to care for the elderly as a career, when the role is so undervalued and looked down upon which you’ve clearly illustrated in your comment, clueless.

But OP didn't say that - one commenter, pages in, did. By that point dozens of people had already posted just to say how much they don't want kids. I just find it strange.

The full thread is quite the read.

I thought OP was picking up on the media trend for articles like this, with that implication, rather than emphasising it herself (apologies if I missed something, haven't RTFT). The falling birth rate in the west has long been a mad right-wing trope, linked to their desire to limit women's sexual and reproductive freedom, but recently it's become a bit more of a mainstream "concern" (scare quotes deliberate as it does not concern me in the slightest).

The people "looking after" the elderly are not just carers. They are all types of HCPs, social workers, those in the restaurant and retail industries, those in the trades, financial services, and that's just those that are directly interacting with the elderly.
Beyond that teachers are training the next generation of all those above, so are universities, and everyone paying taxes and paying into pensions is looking after them financially.
We need all kinds of adults working - not just those who change the sheets/fix their hips/arrange for a stairlift/actually put in the stairlift/serve them dinner on Mother's Day/invest their pension wisely/sell them food.

Yep, adopting children at any age is difficult. Adopting a teenager who has either been removed after years of substandard parenting, or who has spent a decade in care, is going to be mindbogglingly hard.

Amazing how people just don’t see this.

When you get told that you're not contributing to society in any way it's quite hard not to get defensive.

I genuinely can't work out why people are getting so defensive and feel the need to post repeatedly that they don't want children. Nothing in the original post said there was anything wrong with not wanting children, and OP has repeatedly reaffirmed that since. She is just expressing puzzlement that people frame not wanting them as not being able to afford them.

However, while I think OP is right, I do understand why people see it that way. I might say we 'can't afford' a third child, but to lots of people we could, easily. What we really mean is that we don't want a third child enough to outweigh the downsides, including the financial impact, whereas we did want a first and second that much. If I found out I was pregnant tomorrow we'd manage to afford a third child. If we suddenly had loads more money I would still hesitate over having a third, but it would be much more attractive. So, it feels somewhere between 'we can't afford it' and 'we don't want a third' - neither is quite true. I think the same is true for a lot of people weighing up whether to have children at all.

Clearly financially the best decision would always be to have no children. No one is better off with them than without them. Deciding to have them is always an 'irrational' choice, and so it's always going to come down to how much you want them.

Why would the PP do that particularly? There are lots of jobs that need doing - she’s just making the point countries need a workforce of a decent size to support older retired people.

Its not like that @Sheri99 . You do what you can. Thats like believing everyone lives like the adverts. No one does!!

I can understand why new adults these years would NOT be wanting kids! Parents today spend gazillions of $$ on their kids: birthday parties are in the thousands of dollars range, and the kids get a birthday party EVERY yearf from year 1; commercials/adverts show kids wanting the "best" car to show up at school in so they can look the "best" getting out of the car on school drop off: guilting parents for not making enough money; parents paying full ride for kid's college expenses or being on the hook should a loan be taken out; kids needing to be in paid up soccer and sports leagues and parents paying for all sorts of expenses with that; and the lists go on and on! It is as if there is some big competition parents are all in to see which one can outdo the other! Is insane when I sit back an observe these parents these days.

Absolutely this.

I think for a great deal of child-free people it's not a financial decision at all. They just don't want them.

Exactly.The people who keep saying people should be having more children, to care for the elderly, have no clue.

Not wanting children is a valid choice, whatever the reason is for not wanting them

I have more than my fare share so more likely to get grief for that 🤷‍♀️

It's not anyone's responsibility to be having children so there's more people around to wipe arses in the future

All I can come up with is people need others to have children so they can justify their own breeding

It is a choice not an expectation

53k is the average income in London. But most londoners nowadays who are of childbearing age have had help from parents buying property or will get free childcare. My ex colleague was probably on less than 100k combined but had 2 children, she and her husband basically never moved out until they married and bought a 450k home and her dad helped her care for the 2 kids while she went back to work.. I have been told on mumsnet that to afford children in london, you need to be wealthy or v high income (6 figures), planner ( saved up nursery fees/ bought property- me ), inheritor (get help from parents in terms of rent free living; gifted deposit, gifted home or free childcare- me as I basically never rented past university) or on benefits. Alternative is debt.

What I didn't plan for is infertility in my 20s and early 30s lol. Other than ttc /not using contraceptive sooner than most londoners. Doesn't look like any of these people have the same kind of help though.

Tricky one, less children mean less tax take to pay for the public services we all want and the pensions we expect to have OR we tax people more, which judging by the reaction to the Budget we don't want either..... even though ex BOE monetary committee members are saying was absolutely needed to stabilise the public spending.

Hence we are allowing more and more migration but thats a dead end, the migrants will need care too ( leading to more migration) but the vast majority don't pay much tax....

I think we need to bite the bullet, limit migration (a lot) pay more tax and find different ways to care for the elderly.

You're right. We're getting a flood of hand-wringing articles about the "fertility crisis", but outright blaming women is a bad look if you're not madly right-wing so mainstream/left outlets have to blame the economy instead. Because if the answer is simply that people prefer a child-free life, even if they could afford children, you can't really do anything about that and you just have to accept a plummeting birth rate.

Not one woman I know who really wanted children has ultimately let financial uncertainty stop her. (I'm not talking about women who popped babies out into destitute lifestyles, I'm talking women who worried about money because of self-employed precarity, or job losses, or uncertainty over where they'd have to live, and had babies anyway.)

On the other hand among my child-free friends, money is sometimes brought up as a factor, but just one of many, and even if the couple were ambivalent rather than actively not wanting kids, they ultimately didn't have a strong enough desire for them.

I know people who had fewer kids than they wanted because of financial worries but I don't know a single person who really wanted kids but then had none because of money.

Why can be 'piss off'? He wants to buy which is his choice.

You didn't 'have to'. If it would have been something you weren't willing to do then you could have not.

The man in the article obviously has a lifestyle in mind that makes having children unaffordable to him. It's not about you.

Exactly.
It seems somebody somewhere is annoyed whatever we do.
I have one child but would never dream about questioning why someone else had more or less than me!