To tell you that if a UK woman has not had her first child by 28, there is a 50% probability she will never have children.

Men need to want children more than they currently do. Many men are at best ambivalent about it and put it off until their same aged partner is losing fertility.

Also currently if your marriage breaks down financial support from the father is often poor, even if he pays child maintenance. Having more children than you can support alone both financially and practically is a dangerous choice for women.

Even the men who want 50/50 residency after a split are not ideal, as the woman is the one who has taken the big hit to her earning power up to that point and is now expected to run a house big enough for a family on her reduced salary while receiving no maintenance. It is very difficult to replace that lost earning power later on and her pension will also suffer.

Women who are determined not to lose any earning power or pension due to childbirth tend to have no children or fewer children. Because it's risky for her personal finances and she can't guarantee being appropriately compensated.

I was not necessarily saying it will work or not on a grand scale , I mean tbf I did state even in scandi countries with lots of gov support even their birthrate isn’t skyrocketing.

My point is more let’s not invest all this resources into trying to make it “more attractive” or pose it as a problem if a woman doesn’t want kids. I used to work in education or social services and honestly if anything they/we/society need to just focus more on the kids that are here as so many families - even middle class ones - are neglecting or even abusing their kids in some ways. Rather than actively trying to engineer higher birth rates.

Especially if you’re not going to tackle things like climate change, growing wealth inequality and housing crisis globally or and perhaps most importantly the culture which raisss and allows men to be terrible/absent fathers and partners with little repercussions to them, but massive consequences to multiple children.

And honestly sadly there ARE many women (and men) who were unsure about having kids or even against it but had them due to societal pressure sometimes combined with partner pressure and now regret it.

I’d prefer someone be on the fence and not have kids and regret it later (or not) than have kids and regret it. As it’s massively damaging to the kids who can often sense it and figure it out once they become adults.

They're now trying to "encourage" women to have kids with all the subtlety of a communist parade and I expect it'll work even less - you can force someone to have an abortion, you can't force them to have a baby and raise it (and if you could I doubt the end result would be a useful sane worker).

Agreed. But I fear with the way some sections of the U.S. far right are going , who are now spreading their messsge further, this is exactly their end goal.

deleted due to quote not showing up in the first post! 😀

You would think this would be obvious. But I live in sub Saharan Africa so it’s in my line of sight everyday along with no government will to change the storyline. Foreign Aid helps in the short term but until the people themselves change their mind set it will remain the case.

Another case of the middle ground being better for us all. Better education would mean better governmental choices and less immigration up north. Unfortunately often education and upliftment is in the hands of those in power and it takes war to see them toppled from their thrones creating more of the same.

@Maxorias

”The countries with the highest birth rates are the ones that make it easiest for mothers to have a career - affordable education and healthcare and childcare, paid mat leave, enough holidays or sick days to deal with sick children, high enough salaries to pay for such families without sacrificing all standards of living, etc.”

Nope it’s the exact opposite of that. The countries with the highest birth rates are impoverished sub-Saharan countries with none of the things you talk about.

Countries with affordable education, childcare, pay equality, paid maternity leave etc (eg the Nordic countries) all have collapsing birth rates, despite all the pro-family measures.

A lot of these porn obsessed freaks seem to want to only want anal now so perhaps it’s more the man at fault anyway

I don’t really know how to word this to make sense so bear with me. If birth rates are falling, are we now to assume that they will level out to some sort of consistent lower level rather than we cease having children altogether which is an obvious problem? If so this is a temporary problem and eventually we will have a more manageable number of people on the planet? Surely the argument about an aging population is also temporary as people live longer but also are more productive into the later years of life with advances to medicine keeping us healthier for longer? As the older generation die off and the new smaller younger generation come through the years the situation will normalize to new levels which may be more sustainable to the planet. Sure, there may be ghost towns etc but maybe a return to nature isn’t the worst idea.

Already I can tell that me at 47 is vastly different to my parents and aunts and uncles at 47… I just feel like we are reaping the benefits of more knowledge about longevity and a healthier lifestyle?

😂

And do what exactly?

Force a woman to have a child?

Social media has warped the minds of a generation of young women. If you think porn is dangerous for young men, take a look at what Tic Tok is doing to the minds of women. They are being told how they are so much better, more valid and deserve perfect lives. That no "ordinary" man is good enough to date, let alone have children with.

Men don't need to "step up". It's actually women who need to "step down". Some of us, and a vast majority of young women, live in a fantasy world. They think they are the most beautiful creatures to ever exist and that some multi millionaire guy, with a six pack, a Bentley and 600k followers on his Instagram is going to come along and wife them up. This isn't going to happen. So there's nothing left but staying single and childless.

Take away all the fake up, falseness and filters, and all those "stunning", "gorgeous", "living their best life" young women would be what they really are. Ordinary, nothing special, real life without the photoshop. And there's nothing wrong with that. We are all like that. But women are telling each other that they are better than ordinary life. We need to stop this nonsense.

As an aside, I think falling birth rates are a good thing. We have made a mess of this planet. And a few billion less of us is probably a good thing.

The countries with the highest birth rates are the ones that make it easiest for mothers to have a career - affordable education and healthcare and childcare, paid mat leave, enough holidays or sick days to deal with sick children, high enough salaries to pay for such families without sacrificing all standards of living, etc

This doesn’t seem quite believable to me. Of course you must mean among developed countries, but is that even accurate?

I think this is a seriously overlooked problem. I think too many men are just not dateable, they won’t make good partners.

They cannot support themselves, let alone
a wife and child. Many live so unbelievably slovenly, it’s heartbreaking

Ah the "Which is basically saying ..." defence which is always followed by a straw man!

Anyway, sounds like you are generalising your own experiences to all men, which is of course reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. Do better.

I think rising rates of disabilities is putting a lot of people off, even if it isn't clear to what extent it's just that we're recognising things like autism and adhd when in the past we weren't if they weren't extreme cases. This article in the Guardian is saying that one in three parents have now sought a special needs assessment for their children. I don't know the figures for when I was at school in the 80's but I'm 100% certain it wasn't 1 in 3.

I think that a woman who doesn't want kids won't have them no matter how many tax breaks she's offered.

One who's on the fence, however, may well decide to go for it if the stars are aligned (see my previous post about affordability, education, career, healthcare, etc), and that doesn't make it something she "doesn't really want to do", just something that she wasn't sure she had the means to do.

China made it really clear that mandating how many children someone should have doesn't really work and only leads to horror stories (late abortion, murders, abandonment, babies without an official identity to this day, etc). They're now trying to "encourage" women to have kids with all the subtlety of a communist parade and I expect it'll work even less - you can force someone to have an abortion, you can't force them to have a baby and raise it (and if you could I doubt the end result would be a useful sane worker).

I'm.not convinced by this data - everything I've read goes to show that women do end up having fewer children than before. Not necessarily because they don't want them, but for multiple reasons (chiefly, affordability and compatibility of having a lot of children without sacrificing your career).

A lot of people say that a declining population isn't a bad thing, and I agree. However, the population declining too steeply will give rise to civil unrest and is undesirable. The decline should be slow and sustainable for our societies.

As for not worrying because there are 8 billion humans - a population can disappear within the span of an individual's lifetime. Not saying this is gonna happen, just a reminder that the eight billion people currently alive are all going to die within a hundred years, and the population will then be however many babies were born in that time.

The countries with the highest birth rates are the ones that make it easiest for mothers to have a career - affordable education and healthcare and childcare, paid mat leave, enough holidays or sick days to deal with sick children, high enough salaries to pay for such families without sacrificing all standards of living, etc.

I have three children. If I wasn't born in a socialist country with free healthcare, education, etc, I'd have had one or two. Or maybe even none, despite having children being so hugely important to me. This was never so obvious to me than since I moved to a very american-like country where everything is expensive and public education is crap.

Women still want children, but they have to be given the means to have them.

Ah I see what you mean! Sorry I kinda assumed you were a man bleating about women not understanding them or something. Really sorry you had that experience, yeah in that case most women wouldn't think that would happen. Ugh it's so very depressing.

Charlie’s is that you back from the grave??

The only reason people say that is because of the current economic model we are using. Economics has to be restructured to take account of ecological stability. We can restructure economics - we can NOT restructure ecological sustainability.

Exactly this.

And tbh I think we need to question the idea of ‘making it more attractive’ , because it should only be done by people who really want kids , who understand the demands of it and are well equipped to be good parents. And what these parents need to parent well goes beyond what governments can offer.

Women are realising this and the general sacrifice it takes to be a good parent, and if they’re not that keen on their life changing so radically and/or haven’t found a good potential father they’re sensibly walking away from it rather than having kids for the sake of it. Good!

I believe this is why the Scandi birth rates are not through the roof despite all their government support.

Theres no need for a charm offensive to try and convince reluctant people to be parents especially women who are the most impacted by childbirth/parenting.

I think the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family is somewhat to blame as humans are not designed to parent in a two person unit (not to mention a single person unit)! We are now mostly all working nine to five to fund our tiny little houses and struggling to find childcare while we work. We are social beings designed to live together in small communities and that has been taken away from us, that's what makes parenting so hard these days, the village is gone. I don't blame people for not wanting to have children in this society.

Radical feminism is also a label adopted by women nowadays who reject liberal feminism's lie that women are dickless men and can simply slot into male-pattern careers, dating lives, and reproductive habits with only minor adaptations ("we just need to remove the stigma!").

Perhaps you are very academic and exacting and prefer a more specific term like materialist feminism, sex-realist feminism etc but PP is not the only person to use the term radical feminism for a movement which sees biological sex differences / embodied sexual dimorphism / differing reproductive roles as the root of women's material conditions and therefore we need to engage with those differences to improve women's lot, not ignore or suppress them.

Particularly when positioned along a "radical - liberal" axis, I would bet that the average 2025 "radical feminist" is not thinking of Firestone or the 70s.

Maybe just let women not want to do it. I mean some will have dc still, because they want to. But I’d prefer the social pressure to drop.

This is a very difficult one. Because those that really want children, tend to have more of a biological than a practical need. And those of us that have children, whilst yes a percentage of us will Say how amazing motherhood is, so many of us are also being very honest about the struggles of it, and I believe this is more about the way that the world is currently structured. I just don’t believe the world is family friendly at the moment. From the breakdown of Icommunities, to war, to instability in climate, and just a general fear for the future – nobody wants to raise anyone in this climate.

So whilst your point about women saying they want children but ending up child free, being the “saddest” part of this issue, I do wonder if this current trend will be the beginning of us accepting that having children does not have to be a norm. Whilst we may not be able to fight the biological urge, normalising being child free, may create a society where we don’t feel that pressure to really have kids. We don’t all need them. (Does anyone want to share mine!)

Whilst I understand all of the difficulties that come with an imbalanced age population. A part of me feels like we need to slow down with procreating anyway. It also freeze up more time for us to solve some issues, whether that’s through work or entrepreneurship or community.

As a mum of two (im a little biased) I definitely believe there is a place for children. But also we have not created the best environment for women to raise kids, our villages are gone, Support isn’t there. And whilst I know our children are here to continue society, I would love to flip this debate on what some of the positives of depopulation could look like.

You’ll never make it attractive enough to reverse the trend. Women have decided that there are more interesting things to do than have babies. We’ve overcome the biological imperative, because we realised that at the end of the day it was mostly a social imperative.

Whatever we do (short of full-on Gilead) it will not be possible to turn around the falling fertility rate. No country has managed it. The best that might happen is that it will stabilise at somewhere below replacement level and societies will need to adapt to ever shrinking populations.

No because you can have two potential outcomes with say a 70% chance of one and a 30% chance of the other. It isn't just 100% divided by the number of potential outcomes.
The data here says it becomes 50% - 50% at age 28 but this will be on a curve, with it being something like 60% - 40% at age 26 and 45% - 55% at age 30 (I don't know what the actual curve is but that's how it will work).

I will stick with my pristine home, ability to be spontaneous, fitness, travel, interesting hobbies, career progression, time to nurture friendships over shitty nappies, toddler tantrums, irreparable damage to my body and vagina, disturbed sleep (a form of torture), damage to my career, family friendly holidays, clutter/plastic toys in my house, all my money going on my children et all....Women are now more educated and many have decided it is absolutely thankless and not worth it. No longer will we be beasts of burden, nor human incubators for sub par men.