U.s. Sees 5.7m More Childless Women Than Expected
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The US has 5.7 million more childless women than expected, sparking discussions on the underlying causes, including economic uncertainty, changing social norms, and the impact of technology on relationships.
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https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-... ("On the whole, a clear conclusion emerges: because different cultural groups often have unique income levels, efforts to correlate income and fertility are often deeply misleading. Global fertility decline was kicked off almost entirely by normative and cultural processes, not strictly economic ones. The effect of income on fertility is not even remotely consistent across cultures or even across times. When whole societies become richer, they do not necessarily have fewer children. Once we control for the basic problem of cultural stratification, the supposed link between low income and high fertility, or high fertility and low income, largely disappears.") [Institute for Family Studies is a pro nuclear family, pro natalist think tank, so take their analysis as you will]
https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/51/26
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
The rent is too damn high
It takes longer into adulthood to achieve stability
Porn brain
Phone brain (24/7 infinite entertainment)
Dating apps are not delightful
The pandemic led some people to stay in for good
Loss of third places (rent too damn high again)
Tight job markets lead to reluctance to bring kids into the picture
Healthcare is more expensive every year
American individualism diminishes multi generational family support structures after a generation
A long tail of other causes: drugs, gun violence, obesity, losing one's religion, growing up with divorced parents
The thing that I think is different - even when I was an atheist, I had the value of "children" very strongly - that they are my way to bring life and perpetuate my ideas and contribute to the world. This was always strong with me, and I see similar concepts strong with my religious friends. Meanwhile my secular friends are much weaker on their motivation "oh... yeah maybe I'll be OK with kids if it happens" - because the value is not there, they aren't motivated to deal with the things you're listing - even though these things are NOTHING compared to what people dealt with in history and still had kids.
Until recent human history, though, humans had far less control over childbearing than now. And children in the past were relied on to provide supplemental labour to maintain the household which was, much more often than now, a farm. So at times there were very practical reasons for childbearing.
But agree, deeply held values enable some to overcome obstacles.
For example, religious people don't use birth control and have more kids - but it's because that's what they want. To believe that someone has the discipline to adhere to the tenets of religion (eg respecting the sabbath, dietary laws) but keeps having unwanted kids due to uncontrolled lust for his wife, seems bullshit on its face.
The "farm help" thing... I think most people then and now see kids primarily as another mouth to feed in perpetuity, and not some sort of revenue generating asset. Certainly people who have a lot of kids today, aren't doing it for financial reasons.
And when I think back on my grandmother who was one of 5 or my wife's grandparents who were one of 10, it wasn't because their parents were harnessing them to a plow.
People today have kids because they love them, and because they want to cast a vote of influence into the future. I think people in the past primarily had similar motivations. The "farm help/birth control thing" is cope for the childless primarily, no parent actually thinks this way.
Because its illegal, people did certainly use kids as financial assets back then. Your kids was what took care of you when you grew old, there were no pensions or old folk homes, it was just your kids.
All of my religious friends have two, three kids, perfectly fine or above average incomes.
It’s just not a priority for non-religious people, and there was never a loss of third spaces. Church hopping to date is a thing. People share values. Congregations celebrate new babies and chip in. Community exists.
It’s a comparatively bad experience for those without that support. The secular world has none of this except maybe immediate family, and even then I don’t see support from non-religious parents to their non-religious children. So of course these people think these things. They’re basically thrown into the world with no social net.
I went to a few church services when a few of my friends invited me. I stuck out like a sore thumb. At the door on my way out the church greeters wished me well-while avoiding any eye contact. To each his own, I guess.
I can try to make an example. The reason people bow their heads in prayer is to acknowledge our finite mortality and limitation, in the face of the eternal. It puts us in our place, and creates the correct mindset for the prayer. For someone who prays, the bowing of the head isn't just "what you're supposed to do" but an indication of something much more significant and impactful on one's life.
In fact, the idea represented by bowing down in prayer, and the topic of this thread (relationship between religiocity and stance on grief) can be connected.
In the advanced math classes I attended discussion and clarification was encouraged. In my stochastic calculus class the professor once made a mistake - which the brightest student caught. The professor thought about it for a few seconds, said this is a mistake indeed and he does not know how to fix at that time; then kept going. At the next class the professor came up with the solution to the mistake.
Imagine standing up in the middle of the church and saying something about evolution. Very different behavior / attitude. Like I said, to each his own.
You're right that if you started shouting about evolution during prayer time, you'd be just an asshole - same as if I interrupted my biology lecturer to talk about the book of Genesis.
There's a time and place. The most proximate example is when we read the Torah and the reader (whether that's the rabbi or someone else) makes a mistake, the community corrects him. There are certain things we take as tenets of faith, and it's not up to the reader - or any in-the-moment leader - to mis-state them.
But closer to the spirit of what you're saying - attending a church service is not the sole religious experience. For example, there are lots of classes on interpreting scripture on ever-deeper levels, and finally the Talmud itself which is basically a narrative of logical and philosophical debate. Questioning and challenging "what this means" is an expected, welcome, and necessary element of engaging with those things.
For Jews especially, exploring and questioning our religion is part of the experience. There are things we take as tenets that form our basic understanding and from those axioms it's all built via logic and subject to examination.
My religious friends also have 3 kids for each family. College (or vaccination for that matter) is not in the cards for these kids. The wives stay at home to take care of the kids. The families live out in the boonies - the dads have 1 hour commute.and even so they are leveraged to the hilt: they bought their homes with a regular loan + HELOC. The kids are very religious-they shun Halloween and video-games for example (but the girls have their Instagram accounts ). For each his own I guess.
It's a matter of priorities. ~4 years ago I moved from NYC to the burbs to have room and a high quality of life for my (now 3) kids. It lengthened my commute and increased my housing costs but I perceive it as unquestionably WORTH it, and I suspect your friends do too.
If your friends were given the choice to not have a HELOC and not have one of their kids - they'll take the HELOC and the kid. It's not an unreasonable choice.
Kids shunning video games and probably less device addiction in general and more face-to-face engagement with friends and family -- weird to talk about that as a negative in this day and age. I suppose you were the same guy that saw it as negative that your religious friends sang songs around the piano?
>> Does the congregation provide cheap daycare? Or cheap college ? Lack of both was the main reason me and my wife have only 1 child.
frankly if it was important you'd figure it out. I have a cop friend who had 7 kids (3 own, 4 adopted). How do they make it work on a cop's salary? They make it work. He's got a long commute and a beater car but there's no part of him that'd trade those things for a nice car but only 1 kid.
maybe just understanding the list might help to conquer it, at least on a personal level.
There's something I've been thinking about. Might be too general for your list: lack of connections.
Belongs on the list right next to "loss of third places".
Did anything happen in 2016 that young women might have interpreted as a signal that they were on their own and facing hostility?
My wife and I are conservative. My neighbor and his wife literally worked in the Obama White House. I have a Trump-era kid and 2 Biden-era kids, as does he.
Both our wives care about election outcomes and yet neither would look at 2016 or 2020 or 2024 and decide "never mind" on their life-long commitment to family. And neither would anyone else. Nobody was trending in the good direction and then was derailed by an election.
My wife and I are not conservative; but I would agree that no one is tracking the election results as a go/no-go indicator for child-rearing. My wife and I have 3 children, two of whom are adults so our decisions were made in a different era. Instead of bipolar political outcomes, I think many are affected by a sense of unchanging disinterest in the wellbeing of the great mass of people that populate the country. As long as the GDP rises, it’s good times, right? Few on either side of the political divide want to talk about the distribution of U.S. national income. Want more kids? Make life less difficult for families. Both major parties have completely failed to do this.
nice lil both-sides-ism fantasy escape - now back in reality, do tell which party specifically platforms AGAINST distribution of concentrated wealth ? and which one is FOR it?
Hm?
> on their life-long commitment to family.
You can hear how disconnected your lived experiences are from the topic at hand here, right?
You do you.
One huge benefit of religion is a timeless/eternal orientation in thinking. Like, if someone takes concepts like "spending eternity in heaven or hell" - they are indeed thinking about eternity, a topic that an atheist never has to be concerned with. And I say this as someone whose religion does not orient around a traditionally understood heaven and hell.
The reason I mention that is because it's obvious that in the grand scheme of things whatever you're worried about today won't matter. Whatever evils you see in the 2024 election (I don't but that's the political difference) pale in comparison to what someone could discern at different points in time. And yet - I am very glad my great-grandparents decided to have my grandmother despite the turmoil around the Soviet revolution. I am glad my grandparents decided to have my parents despite their horrific experience in WW2. Both of my wife's grandparents literally went through concentration camps as eastern European Jews, and still went on to have families. I have cousins born soon after 9/11, etc.
The point is - looking back on it, as real as those events were, it would be exponentially more horrible if they "won" not by how horrible they were, but by making good people give up on the whole game.
If I dare go on a limb - I'll suggest an alternate perspective. Whatever forces caused you to see "fascism and antifeminism" so strongly today that you're not having kids, have done you more permanent harm than anyone else.
Frankly, this is the most presumptuous comment I think I have ever received.
I also do not understand why I need to justify this decision in public.
My last question was one of curiosity. I can reframe but I don't insist on an answer. As I clumsily tried to allude to - I see religion as a source of "timelessness" that anchors somebody to something other than what's happening today. I hear from my religious friends things like "we know it seems today that X, but our faith supports us in believing its Y." So for them, "be fruitful and multiply" would be Gd's eternal command, that would override whatever seems to be the case today. So I was genuinely curious whether that's very different in Christianity (I know there's a huge range of sects and beliefs within it) and how these things are reconciled. But I of course understand that's very personal and I didn't mean to tangle my curiosity with a need for you to "justify your decision". Sorry.
I also find the idea that "thinking eternally" is bound so tightly with "having children" to be very odd.
>> I also find the idea that "thinking eternally" is bound so tightly with "having children" to be very odd.
I guess I can't relate to that. What I do today in my life is only due to (a) the fact that my ancestors fought and labored to survive and procreate and (b) of the values they passed down.
From my grandfather's perspective, I am his agent in today's world, and Gd willing my own grandchildren will be mine (and therefore his) agents in the future.
So one thing I meant around eternal here is that my own role and time is less significant in context of this greater continuity. Or put it another way, I could easily find seemingly valid reasons to not have kids but the fear of breaking this cycle and being the last of the line feels to me very opposite of orienting to eternity. Again, I understand that's not the choice you're making and that's totally cool, I am just explaining my framework.
Study Shows Number of Childless Women in the U.S. Continues to Rise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45268830 - September 2025
Like, if you think that your future is a good place, then you're more likely to want to have kids.
If we want to raise the birthrate, then we've got to listen to the people that can have kids and do what they want.
It's all about perception as no one can predict the future.
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