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.

[RetiredMan]

I just watched the documentary linked below, about falling birth-rates, released on Youtube yesterday, by the guy who did the research.

(The fact in the subject is from an interview, the documentary itself only give the statistic for Japan, where the equivalent age is 26.)

Some factoids for those who won't watch the video (some are from the documentary, some are from two interviews with the maker that I've also watched.)

Birth-rates are below the level needed to keep population stable everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. (It looks like only a matter of time until it's true there as well.)

That the invention of the pill is causing this is disproved by the fact that rates fell suddenly in Japan 20 years before the pill became legal there. They fell at the same time as birth-rates in multiple other countries, so it's not that Japan has a different cause.

Women who do become mothers are not having fewer children than before, the issue is that suddenly a large chunk of women are having no children at all. In other words, the problem is not smaller families, the problem is fewer families. (If I remember rightly, Japan went from 1 in 30 women childless to 1 in 5, in the space of three years. It's now 1 in 3.)

I think I caught a statistic somewhere that 40% of US women are now destined to be childless. (Presumably that is among those becoming adult now. But I might be wrong about this statistic, may have misheard/misunderstood.)

One reason childlessness is a problem is that 4 out of 5 women who never have children are biologically fertile and would have liked to have had children, but just never made it happen. Obviously there will also be economic issues, if each 20-year-old entering the job market has to generate enough economic output to support multiple 70-year-olds.

Even though birth-rates are falling. generations already born before births peaked will caused older age brackets to have increasing numbers of people, so for a few decades, overall population will still increase despite births decreasing.

The birth-rate of a population can be 90% predicted by the average age at which a women has her first child. The exact figure has not yet been researched, but it appears to be the case that population will inevitably decline if women who want children do not have their first child by their mid-twenties.

Immigration will not be able to solve the economic problems caused by falling population. There will be nowhere with a people surplus for them to come from. (There was a jokey interview claim that India already has ghost villages, they need immigrants!)

The cause of the decline seems to be a failure of couples to get together in time to have children. The data shows a big drop in birth-rates every time there is a major economic crisis. In response to the crisis, people postpone having children, but once society has shifted to aiming to have children at an older age, it never shifts back to having them at the original age.

A metaphor that explains why couple-formation is down. Imagine you live in a village with a dance-hall that is open for three hours on a Saturday evening. Every young person is there for the whole three hours, and gets to see every other person they could potentially marry had have children with. Now imagine the opening hours are changed to six hours, but most people still only have the energy to go for three hours. Some people leave before the person they should have met and married arrives. Some people are half-way through getting to know one person when another person enters and catches there eye, one courtship is interrupted by a new possibility. Perhaps this disruption kills one potential relationship. If the time-period during which most men and women think they need to mate has changed from maybe as little as five years to as long as 20 years, the likelihood that any potential pair will be on the same page at the same time goes down.

So it appears what OP is saying is that young women should sacrifice their youth and their choices for the comfort of him and his elderly friends.
Here's an idea @RetiredMan how's about you write a comprehensive Advanced directive to refuse treatment and opt in for Euthansia in order to free the younger generations from the responsibility of your care and financing, and leave them alone to make the reproductive choices that are right for them and not you.

I think there are several factors putting younger people off parenthood:

• rising costs of housing, making family life unaffordable, no one can afford a home on one income but childcare is equally extortionate
• the push for women to return to work full time when babies are only 6-9 months, meaning both parents are forced to accept a horrendous juggle of work/childcare/kids for the best part of a decade
• the trend to delay starting a family, meaning young couple experience a longer period of being "dinky", dual income no kids yet, where they develop an enjoyable lifestyle of entertainment, travel and hobbies that it is hard to envisage giving up
• people delaying parenthood leading to infertility and greater rates of SEN and disability

It worries me. I go out of my way to tell my kids how wonderful i find it being their mum, in the hope they see family life as something positive. I also plan to give them as much as my time and money as possible to help them afford it.

Family sizes have definitely fallen

I was one of four, most people i knew as a child (middle class up bringing) were one of 3. I knew almost no only children.

Now most people have only one or two children. In my DCs classes there are typically only 3 or 4 families with 3 children. We know only one family with four.

I would have loved more but:

• I started my family later than my own mother and hit fertility problems
• to afford the same lifestyle as my parents, we couldn't afford the decade off work my mother had. We decided we could only manage two DC worth of career interruption.

😂😂😂

I haven’t caught up with the whole thread yet since this morning but I see he’s not been back since last night. How predictable. These instigators just post a few stupid/inflammatory comments to spark “discussion” then run.

"Personally I think it's cos women have woken up to how they are being taken advantage of."

I agree. Women study for longer, life is more expensive and so many men haven't yet realised they have to equally parent, do housework and life admin.

I don't think you know what radical feminism is mate.

Radical feminists (in the sense of the 1900s movement with Firestone) advocate for women to not reproduce. Because getting pregnant potentially makes women vulnerable and dependant on a man. It also stunts her career. And damages her body. And potentially produces more of her oppressors.

You can't just throw terms around and assign your own meanings to them.

What about a 'retired man' advocating for women under 30 "giving" mind-blowing sex in exchange for undisclosed benefits creeps you out??

Somewhat inline with some of the political thinking on this thread; an excellent article in the guardian today about women’s’ roles within families & politics in modern history..
The right is a dangerous political sphere for women’s rights imo.

For anyone interested in the politics angle;
Why strongmen rely on women at home - the Guardian

I decided the best way to respond to this thread was subscribing to Population Matters, a charity that campaigns to tackle the causes of population growth and explains the negative impact of a growing global population. So thank you for encouraging me to support them.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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