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Why won't you have kids??
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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That's a valid reason and all but I'd also add that life is just very expensive, both parents need to work to make ends meet and lack of time available for child care. If you add housework imbalance you get South Korea level fertility.
There is a pent up demand for kids when looking at "How many do you want?" vs "How many do you have?" but having them is irrational for most people. It takes a long while for parents to become financially secure, usually comes at 30+ years and then you ask one of the parents to take a massive career hit and add 3h of work per day to the schedule.
If the gov really wants babies we really need to reduce work hours to 30/week for both parents.
With how long it takes to become financially secure, women are particularly screwed. Millennial women are in their 30s and 40s, nearing the end of our fertile age, with many of us already in the "high risk" category if we even tried. I'm in that group and still struggling to make ends meet. That's an entire generation getting passed over for reproductive opportunities due to the economy, and the most bizarre thing is how predictable this all has been. The realities of our biologies is completely overlooked by those in charge.
Yeah, they're all having their shocked pikachu face on when people don't have babies. If anybody would take a random sample of women and check whether they would have a baby in their position the answer would almost always be no. Now it feels like only people that are dead set on having babies that go for them when the replacement rate needs plenty of people having 3+ to make up for single kid and people who struggle making one or can't find a partner.
So to fix it we only need better economy, minimum wage, median wage, housing affordability, generous parental leave, day care and kindergarten heavily subsidised, schooling subsidised up to uni and 30h week with unpaid overtime illegal. I really don't see this happening with increasing pension and healthcare cost for the elderly.
Also, increasing minimum wage by a lot wouldn't hurt.