"So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support".

I wouldn't even put it on poverty, because large population booms have happened under impoverished conditions elsewhere without issue.

But there's a huge social taboo against pregnancy at virtually any age. Children are treated like luxuries. They're enormously expensive to have and to raise, and everything about childhood is commodified to shit. Add to that how people are all terrified of one another. Men are told to put their prospective spouses on a pedestal, so they've all got to be supermodels with PhDs and rich parents. Women are inundated with the grossest men imaginable in dating markets that reward you for being an annoying creep. Everyone is told to hate one another constantly by a media apparatus that profits off your alienation.

We also seem to absolutely hate kids, in this modern moment. They're constantly presented as violent, parasitic, gross, vulgar monsters.

So much of this is just mass media bombarding us with bad advice and bigoted worldviews. How is anyone supposed to procreate under these conditions?

I wonder what the correlation is to those previous booms vs now when medical bills for child delivery(like all medical bills) are higher than ever? I've done no research but I'm pretty sure it's more expensive than ever just creating a kid. (USA based observation)
- If you want ANY hopium for the US.
  
  Gavin Newsom in California has been making attempts to get the ball rolling on a statewide universal healthcare system, which is almost identical to how Canada got universal healthcare. Tommy Douglass got it in Saskatchewan and it started to catch on for the rest of the state.
  
  Whole Washington is doing some good work.
  
  Oregon too
  
  The path to victory is in the west coast, lads.
great post
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Ngl I think it’s selfish and cruel to the child to have a child in the current world. Why the fuck would I have a kid as I’m facing down a planet that may not be inhabitable in 10-20 years, in a dying empire that limps closer to collapse every day. Where they’ll grow up in fear of getting shot or permanently disabled by covid just to go to school.

And that’s if I could afford to take care of kids in the first place, when I can barely afford to give myself a decent standard of living.

In order to convince me to have a child I’d need the following: Free child care, free healthcare, triple my current wage, a house in a walkable area because kids can’t drive and thus shouldn’t be in car dominated areas, gun control, a better education system, and Climate Stalin.

Climate Stalin
- Strongly influential on Geoff & Wainwright's Climate Mao, presumably.

Fewer people are pairing off as couples, too. Nobody has time for a social life when they're juggling multiple jobs, there's no Third Places, all the social media and dating apps suck, people are more alienated from one another than ever, and to top it off absolutely everything is getting ridiculously expensive. If people don't have a person to fuck and a place to fuck and the energy to fuck they're not gonna fuck, and that's step one of having kids.

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The other factor here is that the main popular entertainment within the imperial core countries is television and videogames which are distinctly antisocial entertainment forms that do not offer opportunities for bonding. These aren't non-existent elsewhere but they're less dominant.

Feels like "Most people are poor as shit" is a pretty good indicator. No need to write a whole article about it.

And, unlike any other point in history I'm aware of, we have contraceptives so we can keep fucking without having babies.
outside of famine/war conditions, birth rates have historically been (much) higher among people (much) poorer than most americans. I think the difference is more that social support structures are weak, "standard of living" expectations are high, education is both expensive and necessary, and contraception/abortion are widely available and relatively destigmatized
- People are poor but if you are poor and have kids there is a huge stigma attached to it if you were raised middle and upper middle class.
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The birthrate is only about 15% lower than in 1975, and 90% of the US population is in a state of financial crisis as severe as the Depression. People should be celebrating that it isn't cratering that hard.
"America is a third world country, and people don't recognise it... and I think that that's pretty god damn sad, that they don't recognise their own country as a third world, third rate, third class slum."
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I have a better answer:

I have a theory that millennials are the first generation to realize how their own parents fucked them up. Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do. Now they do the opposite.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Phillip Larkin wrote this in 1971, so the sentiment isn't quite new. The amount of despair in the air, and the "luxury" of being able to express it and you know... Disengage is newer though
- I'm sure individual people had the idea for a long time but I don't think it was ever a popular idea among an entire generation.
  
  In part this might be because millennials are the most educated generation in history - that has consequences.
Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do.

Oh come on. There's a stack of classic literature a mile high disputing this claim. If anything, the 70s/80s/90s was a renaissance in exploration of the ideas of Good Parenting. But like so much else in our neoliberal hellscape, the idea of a quality childhood was commodified on one end and problematized on the other. The 80s-era parents were constantly bombarded by paranoid "They're sticking razor blades in your kids' candy and stealing children off the streets for satanic rituals!" headlines. They were solid a thousand different panaceas for Genius Children. They were told to hate their own parents, to hate where the parents lived, to hate teachers, to hate "bad influence" of other kids...

Like, on the one hand, its cool that we got a bunch of focus on nutrition and discouraged people from straight up beating your kids to win obedience. But on the other, holy fuck was the discourse toxic.

This generation is just getting a repeat of the shit fed to the last generation. The "don't trust anyone over 30" line is being recycled by the Millennial media hustlers and to the same effect. If you aren't learning anything from your parents this time around, you're falling into the same trap laid by the Boomer era media hacks.

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It's like that simpsons thing.

They want higher birth rates....AND eugenics?
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I'm coming to the realization that I would have kids if I could give them a good life. But I can't, and my household is like, actually upper middle class. It is obscene that with how much money we make we can't even use that money to have a kid and give them a good life.

It's true I am afraid that I would fail to provide my children with an acceptable standard of living on a dying planet thanks mom and dad.

It’s because they killed the middle class. We can’t afford children. The single most effective way I can kill the ruling class is to not give them a future worker to consume. Get fucked billionaires!!

I think that my SO and I would make fantastic parents and we almost certainly have the support system and financial means to have kids. My hang up is, what do you tell your kids in 20 years when living conditions are much worse than they are now and they realize that you must have known the trajectory society was on when you made the decision to have them? How do you explain your choice to bring a new human into a world full of increasing suffering and injustice?

There's always adoption - all the benefits of being a parent and you can easily deflect the blame when they ask you why their spark of consciousness was conjured into this empty and entropic universe.
- Child: Dad, I'm going through a really hard time. I don't have any hope for the future, and I see society falling apart around me. How could anyone create me knowing that this is what life is like?
  
  Dad: I guess this is a good time to tell you that you're adopted
Have you asked your parents the same question? If you haven't, I don't see why your future children would question your choices

Having one child is so expensive. I often look at families having 2+ and always wonder WTF they do to make it work. The answer is always more money and parents/extended family that they can rely on.

For now I just have to hope I don't have many expensive things happen until my kid can enroll in Kindergarten. this-is-fine

Anyoje I know that isn't visibly struggling and working themselves to death to just keep a rental makes close to 6 figures.

I told my extended family that they'd get a grandkid if Bernie won in 2016 or 2020. They made their choice, so did I.

They know, they're just choosing to be coy. Someone's gotta maintain the transparent veneer of normalcy and decorum in this hellhole.

these articles are for people who are already out of touch and to help them feel good about it.

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Okay I've had a think on it and my serious answer is this: We can argue that the world has always been full of exploitation and suffering and pain and that there have been dark times when it seemed like the eschaton was truly at hand (there were people who saw the black plague and still had kids). There's two explanations for why:

People still wanted to fuck despite birth control being unreliable or unavailable.
Kids were an economic necessity - you needed the extra hands to make a farm productive, and the social expectation was that your kids would take care of you when you were old. It was a standard part of the retirement plan.

Re: 1: Now we have free porn and consequence free sex
Re: 2: Now we have 401k's and - pfft, who am I kidding, no millennial thinks they're going to be able to retire and the atomization of society means we're currently relegating our own parents to nursing homes and who wants that? If I'm still alive when I'm 80 I'm going to wander out in the woods and take mind-dissolving quantities of hallucinogens until I get to go face-to-whatever with the eternal Dao and ask it what the hell it was thinking.

tl;dr - having kids used to be unavoidable or necessary for your own survival, and now they're not

If most people stopped having kids, 401k would be useless. Old people still rely on labour of the young, even if it is abstracted.
- True, but now you have a prisoner's dilemma situation where it's to the general benefit to have kids but not your personal benefit. So we're relying on other people's kids, or, as the high-income country birthrates decline and the equator continues to heat up, immigration.

The imperial core continues to lose its grasp on the planet so we in said imperial core unilaterally decided that future generations are a waste of time.

I think it's a bit more insidious than that. It might be more of specifically a boomer thing. Thanks to the advent of TV, baby boomers grew up with TV and the idea of living vicariously. To this day, they live vicariously through the wealthy, and in a sense, they also live vicariously through their 30-something/40-something kids. Why else would they keep trying to make decisions FOR their grown adult children?

College ain't working out? Well, we like trades now. YOU should go learn a trade.

Can't find an apartment in your local city? Don't worry we chose for you that you will live in the boring suburbs because I like suburbs. Here, maybe you can afford this house in Nowhere, North Dakota.

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yeah uh performance anxiety. couldn't be that the modern life is filled with shit and people are choosing not to force someone else to live here and people who barely have enough to support themselves deciding they can't afford the responsibility/burden

i don't want to take care of a cat wtf do i want a kid for?

i'm not having kids because i don't want kids. hope this helps

fr fr

Mine wasn't planned but we're trying as hard as possible to break the cycles of trauma we inherited from our families.

Also we're insanely privileged to have helpful family. We'd have been fucked a couple times already without a helping hang

The schools here suck and I can't afford residence in the good school district.

I mean I'm infertile now so shrug-outta-hecks

But more seriously I have a masters degree and I'm still barely keeping my head above water. Like I legit don't think I could even take care of a pet rn

I want to have kids in the future and have confidence that my partner and I will be able to figure it out and that the joy of having children will outweigh whatever hardships it may put upon us.

I respect that others may not want the same for themselves, but I don't buy this anti-natalist doom and gloom shit at all. People in dire economic and environmental conditions have been having children for all of human history.

If my kids really don't want to live through what's to come, they can kill themselves, just like I can and don't even though things are only looking to be shittier in my future. But I'm not going to make that decision for them.

Holy shit, they can just kill themselves?? Do what you want, but if you really view the world as only getting worse, why not just spare them from having to off themselves?
- I'm saying that I don't see it that way. I am a communist because I am an optimist - if I was a nihilist, I wouldn't bother investing myself in the notion of progress and improvement. My point is that, even if the malthusianists are right, I still do not recognize malthusianism as a valid reason against having children - they will have free will, they can do as they please. My guess, and my bet, is that, like me, they will appreciate being alive, in spite of its associated pains, and will feel empowered to rise to the challenges of whatever times they face.
  
  Life is full of joys, and we are going to have to deal with large-scale economic and environmental changes in the next 100 years. Neither of those statements precludes the other. I am not going to deny the future generation the opportunity to exist because of my prisoner-of-the-moment paranoias about the future. If the malthusianists are correct, they can have the last laugh. I understand that people can also make valid individual decisions not to have children and I respect that 100%, but I find the wallowing in fear of the future exhausting, dispiriting, and counterproductive to the leftist cause, and I reject anti-natalism as a point of leftist philosophy.

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Dear boomers,

what part of "I'm poor" don't you understand? Also, why do you guys keep trying to speak for us on our behalf rather than directly ask millennials?

Sincerely,

someone who's gen Z.

i want to have kids, but so far i haven't been able to hold together the right combination of people and economic stability for it to play out. at 32, i'm starting to get there. now i just need to find a couple more partners and we'll be good to go. i understand why people might not want to "doom their child" to an uncertain future, but it seems like the right thing for me to do.

I just kind of haven't met anyone I actually like like that. Also greater obligations preventing me from directing my attention where I please when I please is not a prospect I relish considering how little control I have over my life as-is (and the anguish that lack of control causes me)