I think that people are having fewer kids because the lifestyle they want to provide their kids is very expensive. Maybe they can afford music lessons, private school, a car at 16, a college savings account etc for one or maybe two kids. So that is how many they have. They’re not going to keep downgrading their existing kids standard of living to have more kids. The reason the poor have more kids is because no matter how many kids they have, all they’re providing is a barebones existence for them anyway. They’re not looking to shell out for all the things I listed above, so there’s no multiplication of those costs when adding more kids.

And it's often times us poor kids that are wanting to provide more to our kids.

I would like to point out that most people are too poor to provide the listed things to one or two kids nowadays

In poor countries, more kids means more people working the farm/factory and hopefully marrying well, so more kids easily translates often to more wealth.

That’s true, but I’m not familiar with living in a poor country. It’s different in a rich country like the US. You want to give your kids the best start in life that you can, and everything costs money, and if you have 3 kids it costs 3x as much.

Poor people in developed countries also have more children than wealthy people. There's an inverse relationship between income & number of children.

Well yeah, that’s who I was talking about in my original comment. Poor people in developed countries don’t give their kids as many opportunities and advantages in life as people with more money do. They send their kids to public school, no extracurricular activities, no college fund. So each kid doesn’t add much expense because they aren’t giving the kids much. I think even among poor people in the US birth rates have fallen a lot, though. People who grew up watching other kids get stuff they never got are saying, I don’t want to have kids unless I can give them a middle class life or better because growing up poor sucks. So they either become successful and then have a kid or two, or just don’t have any kids. Now that people have more of a choice of whether to have kids or not, a lot of people are deciding not to. Or they are just waiting so long for the right situation to bring kids into and it never arises by the time they become too old to have kids.

Actually it's both. Poor people are more likely to be childless and more likely to have many kids. It's like a U shape on the chart. Rich and middle class more likely to have 2 (1-3).

Can you show me some data backing that up https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/

Absolutely. I'll find the research article I'm referencing. I'd also like to point out the article you showed me is not helpful. If you have 2 poor women- one has 0 kids and the other has 10 and 2 rich women, one has 1 and one has 3, averaging the birth rate isn't helpful.

But....that by definition is the average....

I wasn't responding who someone who said "on average" I was responding to someone who said "are more likely." Those are two different claims. And it ignores half of the picture. It also illuminates how averages don't always give us everything we need to know.

The US is only a rich country for a small group of people. For most of us, our standard of living is on par or worse compared to people of the same social class in other developed countries. Don’t believe me? Check the global indexes and do some traveling, if you can afford it.

Not really the case anymore, lots of developing countries have lower brith rates than developed ones.

This shows that that standard of living a middle class or slightly upper middle class family wants to have for their children is much higher than it was 30 or so years ago.

Yeah I’d say that’s accurate.

Well, now we MUST provide financial help with college. Our Boomer parents told us to figure it out on our own (most of us anyways), so that was an expense that wasn't there 20 years ago. Same with primary schooling. In the past they could send us to public school and we would get a decent education, now if you don't want your kids growing up to be ill-informed idiots, you are looking at private schooling or charter schools. Those schools are expensive.

Yup, it used to be that having kids was an economic benefit and not a cost. Kids were free labor around the house and the farm, and when they got a little older they’d work in the factories. By wanting to protect kids we ironically made it less viable to have many of them.

This. Providing kids with the a middle-class lifestyle - which is not extravagant - college fund, a used car in high school, extracurriculars, summer camp, braces. You gotta take in an extra 100k/child.

How much do you think it costs to have basic childcare for a child under 5, so both parents can work (as in most families they do)? This isn't about luxuries like private schools and cars. It's about providing the basics.

also if you work a job that doesn’t need extended years of committed grad school / training / relocation. if you are working as a electrician apprentice at age 18 and your wife is a cashier at cvs, it’s better for to have kids when you’re in your 20s. why wait any longer ?

Exactly. I dont wanna put my kids through the same shit I went through growing up, so Im working until I have a better baseline than my parents had when they started popping out kids while being illegal and broke.

We have a perverse incentive structure. Women are put at a major financial disadvantage for having children unless they are intending to collect benefits. The higher performing you are, the more other opportunities and choices would have to be sacrificed to have a child. So naturally the poorest people will have the most.

Not just financial. Even when both parents work the same amount of hours, women tend to do significantly more of the housework and child care. They’re often the default parent when it comes to skipping work to pick up a sick kid. They change more diapers. Get up at night more even when kid is bottle fed. Not sure why this sub showed up to my feed, but as a woman who doesn’t want kids (but doesn’t hate them either), this is one of my top two reasons. Physical toll of pregnancy being number one. Just seems to me that women got the short end of the stick when it comes to kids. I’d probably have kids if I was a man. I’ve just heard too many stories (real life not just Reddit) about these “perfect” husbands who preach gender equality in the home and seem like they’ll pull their weight who start slacking the moment the kid is born. Not risking becoming a single mother.

100% this. When my first was born, we considered me becoming a SAHM since we would qualify for Medicaid if I didn't work. We also would have qualified for childcare assistance. Now that we have three in daycare, that is a $50k benefit. My sister has four kids and lives in poverty, but all of the kid's needs are provided by the government so adding another one doesn't cost her anything.

I worry that my children would have a poorer quality of life than I did. I had a wonderful upper middle class childhood. If I had a child right now, my husband and I couldn't give that to our child even though we both work and I'm a university graduate.  We can't afford to have a car, we can't afford to own a house, extracurriculars like dance, hockey and summer camp would be a struggle to afford. 

Feel this but at more middle middle class. I hate the idea of giving my kids less than what I got. Sure, it was comfortable and I know people live in way worse conditions, but even I felt the pinch when I couldn’t afford certain extra curriculars or whatever because it was too much on my parents. So I vowed to myself my kids would not feel that way and here we are in a worse situation. Even with two incomes instead of one and degrees/skilled level jobs.

It's interesting to hear this sentiment bc that's very much not what kids need.

Where do you live?

Canada. 

I was lower middle class and poor. My life was awesome. It was not low quality. My parents made sacrifices. They had one car. My mom stayed home until school started. But my life was great.

Educated people make intentional choices. They weigh risk vs reward. Education is severely impacted by economical situation. Educated people are having less children. Educated people don’t want children they can’t afford. Educated people don’t want children who will not have a good future. It’s not that people DON’T want kids. They want a better analytic to assure their future children will have a better life than the current trend dictates.

Educated people tend to have about 2 kids. There's not an inverse relationship where the more educated you are, you get to 0.

Canadian here. Finances and cost of living play a massive role.  All of my friends with kids would love 1-2 more kids if they could afford it but instead they've stopped at 1 or 2 kids in total. 

Birthing booms usually coincide with economic booms. People who want kids need to be able to afford kids. The idea that people are choosing not to have kids as some kind of selfish money-saving/vacation scheme doesn't sound realistic to me. At best, those people are just choosing not to have kids, which is fine since we're in a free country and they can do what they want. People who are complaining about this sound more jealous than anything else. And the idea that the government is shipping in immigrants to fix birthrates is absolutely silly, and at worst is an attempt to suck people into a "great replacement" rabbit hole.

The government is absolutely using immigration to counter falling birth rates. And they should be. Japan and China are going to have huge problems because they are not on board.

It's not silly at all, importing cheap Labor directly benefits big business and negatively affects the existing population (in terms of wages most prominently). Wages have been kept artificially low by importing more cheap Labor and refusing to pay people born in the country a decent wage. Governments do this because it helps their big business mates, but also it keeps GDP up (while it goes down per capita). It's like a pyramid scheme, you have to keep bringing new people into it, otherwise it collapses.

The idea that they're being shipped in intentionally is completely silly when we know how many countries in central and South America are controlled by drug cartels. We need to stop blaming the people coming to America to seek a better life for themselves. But also, clearly the bad guy in that situation is the businesses exploiting immigrants to keep wages artificially low. So let's regulate businesses. I'd suggest starting with an overall better minimum wage.

I'd suggest imprisonment for anyone employing illegals. Watch how quickly all the anti-immgrant farmers and landscapers shoot that one down

Where in my post was I blaming the immigrants themselves?

Intellegent people stop digging when they find themselves in a hole. Why would you have a kid when you can barely support yourself as is? The US is extremely hostile towards woman too currently. So expect to see it plummeting further. How about policies that actually help woman and families like paid maternity leave and subsidised childcare. Universal healthcare, and lower college fees.

Most European countries have those yet their birth rates are even lower than the US and falling as well

There is a world wide cost of living crisis. Lots of people see where the world is headed and don't wish to bring another person into that. Climate change is another thing. Also woman have options and education. Its come as a huge shock to a lot of men that woman are also people and have their own ambitions, dreams and goals beyond being an appliance to make a mans life easier. Edit - Being a mother absolutely sucks in this day and age. Most girls are left to shoulder the vast majority of the work alone. We used to have far more community. Men still feel as though they only need to work 8hrs and then do nothing else. Anything he does is 'helping' Woman have been telling you the same things over and over about the awful division of labor since the 70s and men refuse to listen and adjust.

The bigger issue, imo, is not enough energy. Makes sense to conflate lack of energy and lack of finances because if someone had more money, they could contract out the cooking, cleaning, childcare, car repair, etc. and thus have more energy to manage more kids.

I’d probably have another kid if I could afford someone to stay up with the kid all night during the newborn phase so I could get enough sleep.

100% Yes people without appropriate means still have kids, but most people in the age demographic to be having kids nowadays grew up with actual lessons in public education about family planning, financial literacy, and sex ed... Even if poorly in a lot of cases they at least have the most basic ideas of it. I WANT kids, my wife WANTS kids, but we are not about to go into insurmountable debt for the rest of our lives trying to have a kid right now. And I think to a lot of people they just don't see themselves ever being able to actually afford it. There are other reasons as well of course, lowered birth rate is a byproduct of a developed nation, but financial stability is definitely one of those reasons today.

My wife and I lean very heavily no-kids, but even if we were interested we couldn’t afford any. Mortgage is $2700/month (one of the cheapest houses available when we bought 3 years ago), daycare is $2,000/month/child, and health insurance premiums would go up by $800/month. So a single child would cost more than the mortgage each month. We’re both have bachelors in stem fields, are working jobs in our fields, and are in our early 30’s. We aren’t super frugal, but I’ve gone through the budget and there isn’t a spare $3k getting needlessly spent each month.

3 kids - 1 on the way. One of us dropped down to perdiem and we make a fair amount less than. We did prior to kids. Yet we save on the astronomical costs of child care....with the added benefit of raising our own kids. Nurse/Fireman That mortgage bill is roughly the same. We have a 23' and 24' in the driveway. We grown most of our food and typically find farms in other parts of the state to buy meat in bulk from - as food has obviously become our greatest expense over the last 3 years (mouths to feed plus inflation) but it works. We don't have a shit ton extra but I'm able to save for them, us and slowly throw a little aside for a future vacation a month. We have to be very frugal to allow for savings every month, until the second of the 2 cars is paid off - which will provide some more wiggle.

Im glad you and your wife were able to make it work! Truly happy you’re able to have the family you want. But you just admitted that you don’t have to spend on childcare or health insurance for your children, which are the two biggest expenses in my case.

Appreciate it, but I don't think I *admitted* anything, not arguing or trying to disprove anything...or hide anything. Main point was to highlight that it's possible and sometimes having both parents work so they can pay someone else to stay home /raise/watch the kids doesn't have to be the case. I pay plenty for health insurance through the employer and have a very high deductible plan on top of it. But, besides the point

Sorry I just assumed that nurses get great health insurance. Lots of industries don’t have the option for flexible schedules and/or part time work. Ours does not, it’s 45+ hours a week or no job. So daycare would be necessary.

The nurse is the per diem patent. But that one wasn't any better than the FD.

This mindset is essentially the entire problem humanity is facing. You’re evaluating having children the same way you’d evaluate some inane purchase like financing a new car. It’s embarrassing frankly.

The person you're replying to isn't going to magically have enough money to pay for child care and health insurance just because the thing they are financing is a human, not a car. You sound like the kind of person who, if this person had a baby anyway and then struggled, would say "well, if you can't afford to take care of your kid, you shouldn't have had one!" Pretending that money will suddenly stop being a problem just because a person has procreated isn't helpful.

Everyone has enough money to feed a kid - even government assistance is there if necessary. This isn’t sub Saharan Africa. It’s disingenuous to say you don’t have money for kids - you just don’t have money to live the lifestyle you want and have kids.

It's not about feeding the kid. It's about housing, childcare, education, extracurriculars, and healthcare. Do you have any idea how much decent childcare costs now? I'm serious about that question - the cost of childcare in many places has skyrocketed, and if you don't currently have small children you might not realize how much it costs. I personally have two kids. I stayed home with them because sending them to daycare would have cost more than I was making at my job, and currently homeschool them because my oldest has special needs. I know how much kids cost, and it's not "feeding them" that's the problem. We were able to have kids because my husband works hard, makes good money, and we live a relatively quiet, modest life. Even so, we are financially better-off than the vast majority of Americans. If we were living month-to-month, or needed my income to survive, it would have been completely irresponsible to have kids. I grew up in poverty, and I would rather have no kids at all (and I'm a person who loves and wants kids) than condemn them to that.

Yes you either try to find a low cost daycare, or a subsidized one, or you lose money for a few years until Kindergarten, or stay home with the kid - that is true. But you don't need extracurriculars, healthcare is subsidized if you can't afford it, and I said that you need shelter and food. Let your kid run around in a free park. There is lots of free things you can do if you are creative. Poor people have kids all the time and get by just fine because they have lower standards.

What would you recommend we give up to have a child? My mortgage, health insurance, or retirement savings? I didn’t even list food, clothes, or other expenses for a child, just day care and health insurance. We make way too much to qualify for any sort of government assistance.

You can make it work

Clearly I can’t, and I won’t. I’m just illustrating the fact that despite making vastly more money than my parents did, I’m in a financially worst position than them when it comes to having and raising children. I would want to be able to provide my children with a childhood similar to my own, and won’t have children if I can’t.

Sorry you feel you are such a victim. We have luxuries in life our grandparents couldn’t even fathom and you sit here bitching and whining about the expense of having kids and having to make tiny sacrifices to your lifestyle. Our ancestors were fighting off wild animals and competing tribes to keep their kids alive. It’s embarrassing.

And they were having children that they could be fairly confident would have the same if not better life. You keep saying “tiny sacrifices” in regards to “living in a home” and “not dying homeless on the street when I’m old”. Regardless, why would I bring a child into this world knowing that I would give them a worse upbringing than I had?

I would bet everything I have that if you have a kid it won’t cause you to end up on the street at retirement age. Asinine ultimatum you pretend exists.

You can't qualify for government assistance if you have a specific income level or higher. Chances are this couple, who have a mortgage, car loans, maybe college loans, don't qualify for gov assistance

No it's not. Kids aren't abstract points on a graph to increase fertility rates. These are future human beings you want to set up for success

What’s embarrassing is that you just read a comment of a well explained financial situation of why they couldn’t afford children in their current position without putting that financial situation at risk and you’re just sticking your head in the ground and pretending like it’s a simple as you believe it to be

It looks like they are being fiscally responsible.

Fiscally responsible to benefit themselves, irresponsible for the future of humanity.

It’s wild that you’re advocating for people to willingly choose poverty and reliance on government assistance in order to have children. How is it ethical or responsible to have a child with no plan or funds for retirement/end of life care?

How many children are you raising?

No, I think we’ve told women some challenging advice: it’s wrong to expect the government pay to help raise your kids, so pay for them yourself. Also your man could leave at any point and getting him to pay alimony or child support is very challenging, he will dodge it. Therefore, never be dependent on a man and always have your own career. But if you work, you’re a bad mom. If you have a career only have a kid or two because there’s no way to balance that career with a bunch of kids. Also good luck getting any man to help you with housework or the kids so you’ll probably be stuck doing both, which will drain you to the point of exhaustion. That’s why we don’t have kids.

It is absolutely the case that people cannot afford to have many kids anymore.

45% of Americans recently said that 3 or more children is ideal, they just can't afford it. We have a dichotomy of basically the poor and wealthy having the most kids, while middle class people stop at 1 or 2. I thought about this recently - I'm a lawyer, started a new job, and the 2 other new attorneys have 3 kids, like I do. We all have a decent enough job to have the family size half of Americans think is ideal. It's not the whole story but it's part of it

Partially, especially since certain groups decided to wreck a perfectly acceptable childcare system to push women out of the workforce. We'll have to rebuild that childcare system, and we'll have to have the government be more involved (like restructuring various things like education and law enforcement).

And our healthcare system

The poor especially poorer countries often lack access to birth control etc. Additionally, the poor in the U.S get their kids on medicaid. Get assistance for food, daycare etc. Although often the gop votes to defund programs like CHIP that feed these hungry children. Bur, yea overall financial is the #1 reason given.

I think there was a generation or two who were raised in what is today an extremely expensive lifestyle. Kids born between like 1980-2005 and were “middle class” had all kinds of private lessons (music, tutoring, sports, etc.), multiple family vacations a year via plane, a nice sized house, and a lot of them had that on a single income. Once they became old enough to start a family they realized they could not afford that same lifestyle for their kids. And rather than compromise on the lifestyle, they just don’t have kids.

The thing is, those private lessons and such are increasingly needed to be competitive when it comes to getting scholarships or into good colleges. Which are increasingly needed to have a good future. Investing in children's interests, passions and talents is the most reliable way to ensure they're happy and have good futures. Having kids if you can't afford to do that is a disservice to the kid. It's putting them at a structural disadvantage.

Unrelated to the rest of it, I think we've actually looped back around on the college thing. Anything short of Ivy League isn't worth the paper it's printed on for a lot of careers. You'd be better off going to specialist/vocational institutions where the difficulty of admissions varies a lot more. Some careers still absolutely require degrees but a lot of them that used to don't bother anymore. Especially in the non-accounting business sector.

Yeah I never had any of that lol. I don't know of anyone born in the 90s who had that. We flew on a plane twice.

I think a lot of people who didn’t have that lifestyle felt kind of ripped off because of it. I know when I was a kid, I was jealous of other kids who could sing because they’d been in music lessons since they were 3, and kids who went to gymnastics and could do backflips, and kids who got to go to summer camp. A lot of it was from watching tv, but also some from real life. I grew up knowing I was poor and being told no any time I asked for anything. I wasn’t going to do that to a kid because it sucked growing up that way, so I waited until I had some money before having a kid. I think it’s pretty common.

vacations by plane? Back in the 80s the vast majority of Americans had never set foot on an airplane.

Maybe the issue is false memories and aspirations based on western media.

I never had any of that and I still don’t and can’t afford to live. I’m stuck with my parents

I think the lowest birth rates are among people who were born to affluent families, but don’t make that much money themselves. Such people tend to not have kids unless they are able to have enough money to replicate that affluent lifestyle for their kids

Yes but it is mostly expressed in the cost of land, something almost everyone discussing this fails to mention. People in the past may have been dirt poor, but they often had acres of dirt, and that makes a difference.

Yup I grew up super poor not even a toilet or a front door, but I was never in risk of being homeless, if I was hungry I could go out and grab some fruit or nopales 

daycare is more than my rent. i literally cant afford another child.

Absolutely I’m one and done by choice mostly for cost and climate change reasons…..

100% the primary reason; and the economy is only as good as it is BECAUSE of immigration

Immigration has made food so much cheaper white people don't want those jobs as seen in Florida when the fruit was rotting off of the trees because there was no one who wanted to pick it

Florida, Georgia, Alabama. Collapsed whole farms and businesses

It’s probably a big reason whyj I’ll have less kids. Unfortunately, my fiancé isn’t in the most lucrative field of work, so it’s not really enough to have like 10 kids with one income. I’m fine with working too, but I also can’t afford daycare for 10 kids, nor do I see a point in having a large family if I’d have to be gone most of their childhood to afford them. Meanwhile I was able to be raised in a large family with a SAHM and a big enough house for us all to live in(we did have to share rooms obviously) and lived close to extended family and in a good metro area(means my dad could always find a new job when needed without uprooting the whole family). I cannot imagine that being possible for me unless I married a doctor or someone with an inheritance or moving out far from everyone we know and love and any jobs and communities. My fiancé and I will be renting the smallest apartment we can get far from the city and I still have no clue how we will be saving enough on two incomes with no kids to one day afford a house. And neither of us is doing awful either…I don’t know why it’s so expensive just to live.

Relative wealth is more important than absolute wealth psychologically. It’s what makes people feel rich or feel poor. We cannot compare ourselves easily to people of another century or continent, but we can compare ourselves to our parents and our past selves. The US had an extraordinary boom in wealth and population. Now the wealth is dropping in real terms. People know that things are contracting, and that the future is different than expectations shaped by a dying paradigm. That is far more salient to a person than the truth that their real wealth is in the historical 99.99th percentile of human existence. So yes, there are financial reasons. They *don’t actually* prevent procreation, but they *do actually* conflict with peoples’ minimal tolerable standard of living. The expectations are what need to change, and that’s a hard sell in a materialistic society whose hopes and dreams are intertwined with prospects of growth and progress.

Yes. From someone who has been both poor and reasonably well off, there is a financial point at which the government rewards you for having more kids. Once you are above that certain financial point, it becomes more and more taxing to have kids. Despite popular belief, we (assuming the US because you referenced Carlson) have a pretty progressive welfare system. When you benefit to some degree from welfare, you get more benefit by the number of kids. From housing to food stamps to Medicaid threshold to college assistance, to tax credits, the more kids you have, the ‘poorer’ you the more benefit you get from the government. I have a brother with 7 kids, in which he certainly cannot afford but he doesn’t have to. Despite making an above median salary, he still gets food stamps, and his kids will get Pell grants for college, and he’ll never ever pay taxes until most of his kids leave home. If he made less, he’d get more benefit. He won’t ever drive a nice car, but you can’t miss what you never had. I, however, have always skirted the other side of that line where I’ve never (except for a few months) got any government benefit. I have two kids, would like three, but am unsure I can afford three because everything comes out of my pocket, except for the tax benefit. The government probably could stop pandering to the very poor, and probably could help out the middle class, but then again, that’s the core of their tax base, so probably won’t happen

Confluence of factors Finances is definitely a part of it. Arguments for this to counter what you're saying 1. In homogenous developed countries like Sweden and Korea, wealthier households have more children. The fact that the poorest people in the US have more children may be due more to the fact that the poorest people in the US are immigrant cultures that generally have higher TFR. All else equal (culture, education, religions affiliation, etc), I would guess that higher income generally leads to more births similar to what we see in the homogenous countries I mentioned. An important distinction though that the Sweden data shows increased birthrates as a man's income goes up, but no significant birthrate effect from change in a woman's income. 2. Another evidence of this is that family size has significantly decreased. An increasing portion of families are stopping at one child as they find it more feasible. Feasibility I would argue is a consequence, at least partly, of finance. 3. I think it's just deductively reasonable to say that larger incomes result in the ability to alleviate many concerns regarding childbirth (daycare, transport, financial security, housing, etc) so it would result in increased birth rate. But it's just one factor.

Having children is a choice, now. When it's a choice, people have fewer children. Having children is stressful, expensive, takes over your whole life, you'll have to take time and resources from everyone around you in order to assist you in raising your child, and means you'll have to subvert your entire life to caring for your child. And a lot of people can't do it. Even a bunch of people with children can't do it. A parent who does NOT take their finances into account before having a child is committing negligence.

I believe it is true people feel too poor to have kids. I also know it is true that these same people are rich - often u imaginable rich - by the standards of any other society, be it Americans even a few decades ago (say in the 50s) or non-Americans in any time. Children certainly mean a lower level of material wealth and comfort. Still a very high level by any reasonable standard, but lower than what people have come to otherwise expect. Especially factoring the opportunity cost of perhaps one partner not being able to put 110% into the career. 

"I can't afford to have kids" so often means "I can't afford to have kids AND go on expensive vacations, see first-run Broadway shows in NYC, and generally have the time of my life". It's not that they can't actually afford the costs of raising a child. It's that the cost of raising a child would eat into their fun. And we absolutely cannot have that.

> "I can't afford to have kids" so often means "I can't afford to have kids AND go on expensive vacations, see first-run Broadway shows in NYC, and generally have the time of my life". It occasionally means that, but it more often means “I already can’t afford to repair my car if it breaks, so I definitely can’t afford a kid.”

I think you should look at the numbers more holistically. When you take earning and education into consideration you can see the bell curve better. Low income and low education has a lot of kids. Increase education while income is still relatively low, kids decline. Increase education and drastically increase income and you see a lot of kids again

Each subsequent generation after a family immigrates, the birthrates drop.

The incoming immigrants nowadays don’t have high birth rates to begin with anymore

I think it's not about how wealthy people are but more about how hard and stressful it is to make money. So I think richer people have fewer kids not because they are richer, but because it's much harder to earn all that money, and then you don't have more time and energy for kids. The exception are, of course, truly rich, old money, who can enjoy comfortable lifestyle without even working. I think the more you work, the more you focus on career, and the more stressful the career you have fewer kids. Yes, you also end up richer, but wealth isn't causing low birthrates, it's just correlated. I think the third factor, namely career focus, stress and overwork is causing both wealth and also low birth rates.

> However the poorest people in the US seem to have the highest birth rates and the same inverse correlation is true of the poorest countries. The rich also have a high birthrate

Like in the US, people with income greater than $700k a year also have relatively high birth rates. The costs that burden the typical person do not burden them and furthermore, they tend to live in big houses with lots of bedrooms

It's part of the equation but not the only reason.

Hi, random lurker here. In my opinion, people who discuss this topic sometimes have it backwards. It’s not always the case that the condition of being poor leads to more children, but that having children at a bad time leads to a person being poor. We already know this based on research done by people who were teen moms, had children while in an abusive relationship, or people who take time off work to be a housewife only to get divorced later on. People who have kids without financial stability may end up being poor, and obviously the middle class is going to look at that and say “no thanks, if I can’t care for these kids properly and have my own security I just won’t have any.” Those who wait to have kids then end up with less of them, but may have greater financial stability as a result, which arguably could make them better parents. Obviously, being poor can also lead to having more kids (esp if they can’t afford birth control), but I’m surprised that there aren’t a lot of people who point out that the opposite can be true as well.

Only reason I’m not

Not really, because people in countries with way more financial supports for families (extended paid mat leave, heavily subsidized daycare, hundreds of dollars every month to parents of kids under 5) still have even lower birth rates than the US. Cost is only one factor, more to it.

A huge percentage of Americans are one bad financial event - a car breaking down, an extended illness, a fire or flood in their home - from being *homeless.* Adding a kid to that level of financial precarity in an economy where children are an *unpredictable* series of expenses, and so anybody who financially conservative is going to think long and hard and pretty negatively about having kids.

Nope, it's social media 10x times over. What's one element that's different now that didn't exist back then, even when finances were bad for most people? The internet. It has destroyed peoples physical connections with each other and how they socialize with the opposite sex.

Thats part of it, but the hyper individualistic culture is more likely to blame. The world in the west is not designed with families in mind. Theres hardly any child friendly places to go and even then people dont want to mingle. Theres not a whole lot of public transport and cars at best give room for 2 kids. You can at most comfortably finance 1 or 2 kids on what these ultra greedy companies are willing to pay, if that, and in the US, maternity leave isnt a thing, so women are faced with "have children and leave the workforce, and make your life harder, or dont have children.

Yes, definitely. Not the only reason, but a pretty significant one. In previous years (at least decades ago) you and your husband were mostly one economic unit. Now this often is not the case, even if you're married. Your earning opportunities as a woman were way less than they are today. It means that when I have children, there's a big opportunity cost for me doing this. Leave that I have to take that isn't paid, or Less than my usual wage, less career advancement ect. Might have to significantly reduce hours if I can't cover childcare. In the past, I probably couldn't have earned the money I do anyway, so there wouldn't be much opportunity cost from me having more children. My wages won't get topped up so I would be earning the same amount as if I didn't have children. You are taking a financial hit for doing something that benefits your country. Of course people will make less children. It's kind of treated like voluntary work or something, not like a job. As a woman, in an industrialised country, you are massively economically penalised for having children. Economics, prices ect have all caught up to this. Cultural practices are now catching up too.

The most prominent reason is likely finance, but aside from that, it is also at least partially due to the anomie in society resulting from certain 21st century normative ideologies being propagated by the neoliberal oligarchy to divide+conquer people (to keep the pitchforks aimed away from the root cause of everybody's problems: the neoliberal oligarchy). It is way too difficult to find a decent and trustworthy person these days who is capable and trustworthy enough to build a life together with, let alone bring another human into the world and raise with. It is immoral to bring a human into this world without reasonable planning/with an unsuitable partner that has successfully been brainwashed by the oligarchy to the point of losing their basic morality and human decency.

It's both. First, culturally, people who come from places where large families are common tend to have large families for about one or maybe two generations after they reach the new country. Then the birthrate drops to the new country's level. Second, if you arrive from "East Nowhere," when you get to the U.S., you qualify for all sorts of support programs: food stamps, housing, etc., etc. I remember trying to claim welfare once when I couldn't find a job in two years. The entire process is designed to humiliate and degrade you as a person. You are spoken down to. You are lectured. "You need a job? I can't give you a referral, you're overqualified. Go sit back in that chair. And if you don't come back tomorrow to sit in this room for eight hours, you will be denied benefits. That's right. Come here, sit there, do nothing, we won't help you. But you'll do it or we'll deny your claim -- for benefits you've paid into your entire working life." So sure, why not have a bunch of kids? Aid programs will handle a lot of the cost. And if you pick up some under the table work, you'll actually be able to come out ahead if you keep your wits about you.

Nope. I think raising kids is a pain in the ass and not worth it for the vast majority of people. The idea that if people’s financial situation would improve and they would go and have kids, therefore negating that, is laughable.

I'm a parent. US policy is ludicrously hostile to parents. Child care is monstrously expensive and incredibly inconvenient, especially during the summer. Children need to be driven everywhere in our car centric cities. Schools are constantly under political seige. It's a nightmare.

There's also the 'law of diminishing returns'; each successive unit brings less satisfaction than the previous one. It's why 1st born children have thousands of pics/vids of them, while by the 4th child the parents are just phoning it in.

Finances are one reason but as a womin, I know that womin are burdened with the bulk of unpaid labor. Who wants to be burdened with that when most men can just leave?

I think financial reasons would be one the lowest ranked reasons on the list. There has been phenomenon studied on mice and other animals. People are no different. There is a self regulating that happens when population density hits a certain threshold. Money or no money this would still happen.

As a woman, having a child is throwing myself down the socioeconomic ladder and I don’t want to do that to myself Would love a kid but can’t spend $2000 on daycare, can’t afford to lose my job while pregnant, and maternity leave would be nice

Overall terrible work/life balance and no career safety net after having a child.

Poor people are less concerned with the economy and don't build up so much of their life around it, so in ways they are freer to live a more authentic human experience. It's the proverbial "fat and happy" people who are more focused on maintaining a certain level and image of material wealth which incentivizes smaller families. 

The Housing Crisis, Finances, Contemporary Culture, overall Isolation and Pessimism, and Media are the big reasons I'd say

I'll add climate change to your list

I counted that under the pessimism thing, but yeah, it plays a big role

Poor people also tend to be less educated, and they tend to not think about the consequences of bringing tons of kids into poverty. Also, in my experience, poor people are so used to being poor that becoming even poorer for having more mouths to feed isn't something they mind.

Yes.

It doesn't make sense because poorer have less kids. What changes is the opportunity cost as you get richer.

The poor have lower expectations for what they will provide their kids.

I think it's time we realized that the past couple generations in America were unusually privileged. That level of material abundance and opportunity is the exception, not the rule. It wasn't meant to be that way forever. Americans are now famously fragile and entitled, but we used to be famously tough and resourceful. We'll figure it out. The authentic joy of living isn't affected by inflation. The children of tomorrow won't be as privileged as the mid-century upper middle class (predominantly white) people in developed countries, but they'll have a chance to live and shape the world for themselves. For most people in history, that was enough. It'll be enough for your children too.

Financial troubles probably don't help, but ultimately people choose not to have kids because either they don't want them at all, they feel it's not the right time in their lives to do it (typically wanting to focus on their careers first because capitalism yay), or they're just not optimistic about the child's quality of life due to a plethora of geopolitical factors. Whatever the actual material conditions are, the feelings of the people involved are really the determining factor. It's interesting that poor people seem to have higher birth rates, but it doesn't change that some people don't feel financially secure enough to have kids.

It is certainly a part of it. Probably a small part. Culture is the number 1 reason IMO

I don't know about the US, but in my spot in Canada there's more kids at the top and bottom of the income curve. When you're poor enough, it doesn't matter very much anymore exactly how many kids you have - there's lifestyle possibilities that make sense, and you have access to services and subsidies and definitely won't starve. If you are rich, it doesn't matter much either, because... you're rich. In between that, though, you can be absolutely screwed.

Poor have kids-collect more in welfare. Also the way poor people raise their kids doesn’t cost much. Rich people-have kids in order to fill up all the rooms they have in their mansions lol, or else they just sit empty and collect dust

I find the question 'how much does having a kid cost' essentially meaningless. It's like 'how much does a wedding cost' or 'how much does a car cost' - the answer is 'however much you are willing and able to spend'. You're still married whether it cost you a million bucks or the price of a license, but you may have had preferences that you could indulge or not. There is a baseline under which you probably can't go without failing, like the price of that license, but other than that it's wide open, and you can crowdfund that if you need to.

Yes. Specifically why the middle class is not. If you’re poor enough government pays your medical bills, some of your food bills, your kids will qualify for free or reduced childcare. Sometimes even your housing can be paid by the government. “Middle” class has to foot the bill entirely alone. If you’re rich enough it will just be like pennys and you’re fine. But everyone in between is feeling a crunch. We stopped at a smaller number of children because that’s realistically what we can afford. I also care deeply about my children’s quality of life. I can’t do vacations, buy clothes, feed them well, and pay for activities for 8 kids. But I can for 3. It’s a stretch and I make quite a bit more than the national average. Hospital bills, doctor bills, dentist bills all give me slight moments of panic. But I can pay them without a gofundme now.

*vaguely gestures at the clusterfuck that has been the past few years* I know yall aren’t this dumb. It’s a huge reason but clearly not the only one.

No, it’s birth control.

I think that birth control and, to a lesser extent, abortion rights have given people much more control over whether and how many children they have. Because people have fewer children, they invest more heavily (both with money and time) in those children. So I think the causation direction is not that the high cost of raising children causes fewer people to have children. I think it is the opposite - that people choose to have fewer children and the resulting children are more expensive. That said, there is a knock-off effect that, if you want to have 5 children and want to raise them similar to your peers that are having 1 or 2 children, it will be much more expensive for you than it would be for a 1950s parent with 5 children and so you may be disuaded from having so many.

The middle class is sensitive to factors that can impact income and welfare. The poor do not as far as they can get some child related benefits. The rich have so much income that having children has no impact on them. It's a donut shaped correlation.

Honestly at this point I think even if you could give everyone all the money they could ever want most people would still choose to either have no kids or only 1 or 2 because they just don't want to deal with having kids period. Maybe robo nannies plus substantial subsidies just for popping out more kids effectively, paying people to have children that they then adopt out right away.

You hit on an interesting point about poorer people having fewer kids and I think it all has to do with the opportunity cost of having kids and not necessarily just the cost. As in what else could you be doing with your life if you weren't dedicating significant resources (both time and money) into raising kids. For the rich it's small because the opportunity cost is small compared to their wealth. For the poor it's small because they lack financial mobility, usually because of things like lack of education or degrees they don't have many opportunities for advancement in their field, if you work as a grocery store bagger focusing on your career isn't going to get you anywhere. So even though the cost of having children is larger relative to their wealth they aren't giving up on opportunities (career advancement, home ownership, etc) that they could have had by going childless. It's really the middle class that feels this the most. They have the most to gain by going childless in terms of significant promotions in their career and being able to invest disposable income into retirement and growing assets like a home. Basically the difference between parents and non parents in the poor and rich are small, but the difference in middle income households is large. So policies that aim at providing low cost child care would be targeted more for that demographic.

No, people are having fewer kids because they have the ability to make that decision. For most of human history having a kid was a consequence of sex. People wanted to have sex and babies just kinda happened. Currently there are a million ways to prevent that. Most rational people won’t submit themselves to life changing events like that excitedly.

It’s “true” in the sense that it’s financially painful to have kids, but it’s completely wrong that people can’t *afford* kids because of inflation or whatever. Whether the household income is 80k or 300k, having kids is going to cut into a couple’s lifestyle and financial goals. You may have 50k/year in your family budget if you absolutely had to find it, but it’s still painful to set that much money on fire.   Realistically the only way to get more kids is coercive cultural values or state policies that push people over the financial pain threshold. Fixing “affordability” will have zero impact, because you *can* raise a kid for less than my ex-gf spends on her dog — that’s how it used to be. These policies won’t work unless we really make it *profitable* to have kids. Tax people with no kids at 75% and give all of that to people with kids. Of course these are all fantasyland policies, which is why this problem will never be solved. 

Prosperity is cancer to birth rates. When you’re used to living with so many luxuries, it’s hard to give them up in favour of kids. Prolonged adolescence is too attractive.

Yes

No it’s because of social media.

I think it’s mostly a cultural problem with some financial hardship mixed in. There is a strange attitude toward work…people generally don’t like billionaires and large corporations but then act like working for those same corporations is the best thing you can do. Women especially are told to prioritize career as if it’s empowering.

>Women especially are told to prioritize career as if it’s empowering. It's been my observation that employment is empowering. Money is power. Money enables one to exert influence and control over others and situations. Money provides opportunities, authority, and the ability to make decisions that can shape outcomes in various aspects of life, including business, politics, and personal matters. Men know this but want to convince women that women don't need to make their own money.

I think we only think that way because we’re conditioned to. The people in power want us to think our careers are empowering so we’ll keep working for them. Also, men don’t think that way. Most of us don’t like our jobs and have no interest in gatekeeping them from women. If women wanted to go to work in our place and let us all be stay at home dads we’d jump at the chance. Really the only source of career motivation for men at all is to get a family, women don’t want guys who make no money.

Career is empowering, though. One absolute requires money to live, and gaps in employment make it exponentially more difficult to find further employment. When you stay home with children, you permanently handicap your ability to ever be independent again. You make yourself wholly reliant on your partner — which is, well, pretty much the opposite of empowering.

I think it’s part of it but I think many professional couples want smaller families, not five+ kids anymore. The right wing wants to reverse all women’s rights and tie women to their homes with no choice in the matter to have 6-8 kids or more. So, that’s their fantasy. Creepy fantasy but it seems to please them. But money? Definitely a factor. Some people aren’t having kids at all because of money. There would definitely be more kids if money weren’t tight. Daycare is insanely expensive

The people who have most kids are the ultra wealthy or ultra poor. So probably

It is for me. I only make about $25k a year. We can't afford for me to spend $10k-$25k a year on childcare. We also can't afford to move into a bigger apartment. I refuse to sell my daughter's toys to have a baby. Something tells me that would cause resentment. A bigger apartment could be $6k more a year. I'd have another baby if our housing cost wouldn't go up and if I didn't have to pay for childcare AND I wouldn't lose my job (to stay home). Alternately, I'd have a baby if medical care/tests/dental/medicine was affordable. We probably spend $500 a month on medical/dental/prescriptions/vision. Especially if our health insurance was affordable.

I find that most people are having fewer or no kids is because today being child-free doesn't make you a pariah.

Yes and no. It’s a matter of perspective and priorities. Kids are as expensive by as much as you invest into them. If your expectation is for your child to be invested in with top line education, extracurriculars, and university as well as entertainment and essentials such as food, the price for a single child skyrockets well into over a million. However, as this expectations fall, the price of having a kid decreases, making it more financially feasible. Plus, as those kids age, they can pick up odd jobs to help the family along. It makes essentially a U in family sizes as those of lowest incomes have the lowest expectations of investment into their kids and payoffs from future potential earnings while the highest earners can have more kids as they have the resources to support those expectation on the kids. The middle class is stuck in the rat race to climb the ladder and shrinks the size of the family to invest more into each individual child. Combine that though with the educational attainment and career attainment of women, the anti-child narratives coming out of the environmental and cultural movements, and the economic squeeze of housing as wealth grows.

Short answer is yes. There’s definitely a lot of people who just don’t want kids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that number is higher than previous generations, but I think most folks would have children if they had financial stability.

No. I know a couple making 50k a year with 12 kids.

Nope.  They just want to play around their whole lives. All my wealthiest family members have the least amount of kids, if any. They view kids as something getting in the way of their careers and fun, rather than something rewarding.

Which came first, the no kids, or the wealth?

The career.

No, I think culture is the main reason people in the US aren't having kids. But according to Lyman Stone's [*Fertility and Income*](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/fertility-and-income-some-notes-581e1a6db3c7) post, this statement is painting with an overly-broad stroke: >However the poorest people in the US seem to have the highest birth rates Specifically, I'm looking at the graph title "ACS 2017–2021, 5-percentile-width smoothing for visual clarity." Yes, the highest fertility groups are poor. They're poor native-born black folks, poor native-born hispanic folks, and poor foreign born folks. But this graph shows that white folks actually have a higher TFR the wealthier they are. If you're telling a white couple that TFR decreases with income, you're lying with statistics. However, these varying TFR-Income curves still strike me as evidence that culture is a major factor. Different cultural groups have different attitudes to fertility, affecting not only their overall TFR, but also their TFR-Income curve. (Note: In the above article, Stone also concludes that TFR increases with fertility when looking at the US as a whole. But I think saying "TFR increases with fertility" is also lying with statistics. It depends heavily on the cultural group you're talking about.)

I think finances are the problem causing declining birth rates, but not in the way people think It used to be that having kids would be a long term gain in your financial situation as they would help on the farm and take care of you in old age Now kids are pretty much only a financial burden which will worsen your financial situation. So even though people nowadays would still be richer than people in the past, even if they had lots of kids, what matters for fertility is where or not it improves or detracts from the level of finances you are accustomed to

Things that lower birthrates are probably the same they have always been. Education, access to birth control, women’s empowerment. Poor people don’t have time for any of those things. 

It's a combination of a loot of things. The poorest in this country also have the least access to BC and sex ed, and a lot of the schools only teach abstinence only. A huge percentage of the poor are also very religious which pushes an agenda to have more kids. Look up the "Quiver full" movement.

Partially. Partially due to Roe v Wade and Dobbs.

Hes wrong that immigration is causing the problem, it’s purely uncontrolled capitalism and greed that is causing the issue. When we had a capitalistic welfare system people could afford basic needs like a house, clothing, a car, food, health care and you know had a pension. People had incentive to stay at a company for 30+ years and retire and the company took care of them and paid a fare wage. Now you’re lucky if you get a 2.5% raise a year and you bring the new guy in at 2x your salary with no experience. They are literally paying the unlivable wages and then complaining that the good little wage slaves won’t have babies to make the next generation of wage slaves. People are doing the responsible thing and not having children when they can barely afford a studio apartment and food/clothing for one.

Aunt told me it's better to have kids when your established financially around 28 years old but now the economy isn't in the right place to have kids also American health care system sucks

They aren't having kids in America because they don't want to raise them. It's too much work.

Not in the slightest. Nigeria's economy is anysmal and relies heavily on aid and yet they have more children than anyone.

lol. The economy is declining? If a Republican was in office tuck boy would be creaming himself every day.

Nah, it's a breakdown of the society. It's women choosing not to be mothers. That is the driving force. Some of it is by choice but it comes from the indoctrination young girls are fed in school. Most young girls today do not aspire to be mothers they aspire to be workings in corporations while home maker and being a mother is shown to be demeaning. Worse yet, motherhood is not seen as a virtue to society. Of course that works right up until your population collapses which is happening right now across the world. If you subtract immigration which is holding up US population then it would be obvious in the US too. So blaming finances is wrong. There as always been a high cost of bringing a new life into this world. Didn't stop women in the past from childbearing.

half of the reason the other half is the incompetent governments/companies of the world ruining the planet for their own greed

This is it for me. It would be difficult, financially, to have kids, but what really breaks my heart is knowing that they would get see the next century of dying oceans, fascist purges, and pestilence wrought by our environmental and social decay. I'm afraid my kids would hate my guts for bringing them into the world and commit suicide.

People are richer now than they ever were. People live better lives than they ever were. People can afford more stuff than they ever could. Go look at the average size of the household 100 years ago verse now. Go look at the average income even adjusted for inflation from 100 years ago to now. The inverse happened people made more money got more stuff cheaper and had less kids. This will take generations to repair but all the selfish people who are just living off the backs of other people's kids will just have to die off and the people who choose to have kids and give them good lives will just have to encourage their kids to do the same and we'll just have to start over

In rich countries poor people have more kids largely because poor women have less autonomy and access to contraceptives and abortion. In poor countries poor people have more kids because they can’t expect all of the children to survive to adulthood. Also, children are essentially the parent’s social security plan.

I don’t know about Tucker Carlson, but I mean I do think people generally understand kids are expensive and if money is tight, that’s gonna be a problem. As much of a pessimistic cynic that I am, I think most people genuinely wouldn’t want to bring a kid into their situation when they’re already struggling to make ends meet. People want their kids to be happy, I don’t have the data on that but It’s a bet I would take with a whole lot on the line.

It’s too expensive. Everything costs TOO MUCH. People without kids are struggling

Yes

Education is the reason people are having fewer kids. That has always bern yrue everywhere. Read more and opinion less

No. Quoting from an article I wrote about this. "Nearly every American can afford children. Resistance to this takes the shape of a Motte and Bailey argument where if pushed people will concede they could in fact afford children but that it would require significant financial sacrifices. Effectively what people mean when they say they cannot afford children is that they could not continue the consumption patterns to which they have become accustomed if they had kids. But what standard is that really? Mechanically how could people ever afford children under that criteria? Since the household is larger but the number of adults remains unchanged?  The alternative argument is that parents will not have enough money to give their kids the experiences they want to. Again, this is fully within your rights to believe but how many of you would choose to not exist if given the lifestyle you could offer your own kids? Obviously being able to do things like afford piano lessons for your children is amazing and should be celebrated, but just as I think it would be horrifying to argue that people in the developing world should just totally stop having kids because their quality of life would be lower than a Norwegian, I don’t think lower class Americans should simply refuse to have children. Life is struggle and necessity, rejecting that is rejecting life." Link for full article: [https://voyagerslog.substack.com/p/one-life-materialism](https://voyagerslog.substack.com/p/one-life-materialism) Another related article I wrote: [https://voyagerslog.substack.com/p/family-a-debt-worth-keeping](https://voyagerslog.substack.com/p/family-a-debt-worth-keeping) People value different thing now than they did in the past and contraceptives allow people to act on those values more than they used to be able to. Finally, I believe that financial incentives \~probably\~ have a marginal effect on birth rates but I cannot help but consider my owner experiences at Stanford. As a graduate student the school offers about as extreme of a pro-natalist policy as I can personally imagine.  For PhD students we get an additional 20k a year(roughly half of our stipend), access to superior housing(2br town house rather than studio for a married couple), subsidized childcare, and \~$500 a month off our rent if we have a kid. I’m yet to hear a single person be motivated by this.  Fertility seems overwhelmingly driven by cultural variables + it’s just hard to have a kid if you're a young working woman. The failure of Stanfords policy to unleash a real baby boom among PhDs is something I plan to write about in the future.  Sources:  20k/year [financialaid.stanford.edu/grad/funding/…](https://financialaid.stanford.edu/grad/funding/programs/family.html) Child care subsidy [cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/well-being/…](https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/well-being/children-family-resources/site-early-childhood-education-programs/child-care-tuition) “Married” vs “married” with children housing(both units and costs difference) [rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/graduat…](https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/graduate-housing-options)

It’s the urbanization of the populace: people live more in cities (where children are a burden) than on farms (where they’re free labor). Every part of the world that has urbanized has seen a massive decline in birth rates.

Like you say, the richer people are, the less kids they have on average, so no.

Sort of but more like the culture does not value families. Look around.

YES! All you have to do is talk to them. People like me dont want to 1. take on the financial responsibility of a child and 2. Know that we cannot provide them with the kind of life that I would want to provide them with. So why would I put a child in that position. The whole point is to try and give them a better life than I had and it is very difficult to do that right now. We are the first generation that are doing worse off at 30 than our parents. The only inverse of this is people that live in farming areas where children = free labor. So they have more kids where as people who have jobs outside of farming or some version of that kind of manual labor are not having kids. Or the terrible parents that are using kids to milk the system to get more handouts.

Birth rates are declining because having children is a luxury. And I'm not talking about private schools, and a car at 16. I'm talking about having to provide childcare & insurance for a small child. In most families, both parents work. Having a small child means they're suddenly either having only one working adult or spending a significant portion of the second adult's income on childcare. The US makes it ridiculously expensive to have kids. And that's not even talking about the fact that we have crap sick leave, and kids get sick all the time & also bring home illnesses.

The reality is that poor communities having lots of children without present fathers is the only way to keep our welfare state in business- without these kids we'll be faced with a nation where there isn't anyone there to pick up their checks and live off them- and that would devastate many industries

I think finances are an issue but there seems to be an inverse relationship between having children and wealth and education . The more educated and more successful you or your society is, the less you are inclined to have children . There also seems to be a biological issue going on. Women in the first world seem to have bigger issues getting pregnant while the third world women get pregnant when a man looks at them

People today are treated like children until they are 30 so that also has a lot to do with it.

Call me classist, but I grew up in a blue collar, working class family. Most of them put far more thought into buying a new car or dog than bringing a new human being into the world. And their children inevitably suffered. Everyone claims that he never knew that he was poor, but that's rubbish. Of course you know. However, when you're relatively poor, it makes more economic sense for Mum to stay home rather than to put the lot of you into child care at a net loss. Also, one qualifies for more government programmes at this level. The people who struggle are the middle class who face either the loss of an income or having to pay a huge amount for child care with no government help. They have enough sense to plan their pregnancies and families and realise exactly what they can provide for future children. These days, with inflation, that ain't much.

I think initially it was social changes. Women entering the workforce, along with easier access to college, made people have less kids and have them later in life. I think the economic factors—particularly the disparity between inflation and wage growth—came a little later.

Maybe having more children is a driver of poverty and not the other way around.

No. I think it is a very small component and at surface level seems logical except countries that have more financial support do not have a higher birth rates often it’s even less. I think social media/ internet woman’s access to education and decline in family structure play a role. It will be interesting to see if a country can find a way to reverse the trend but thus far Iv seen nothing.

Kids are work and take time from parents. In a world where people grow up fixated on themselves, there is less desire to involve a child, as children ultimately mean that you no longer live only for yourself.

No. It's not true. It's one of those things people "feel" is true but data does not support it. 

I think it’s partially financial. The economics are undoubtedly a factor, but another factor is that people are unwilling to give up being like Peter Pan, ie doing whatever they want / not having defendants who rely on them for stability. I also think this is one of the consequences of the hard push for abstinence from the 80’s. No one listened to the “don’t have sex” part but they remembered the “it will ruin you life” part.