r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 3d ago
Health A demanding work culture could be quietly undermining efforts to raise birth rates - research from China shows that working more than 40 hours a week significantly reduces people’s desire to have children.
https://www.psypost.org/a-demanding-work-culture-could-be-quietly-undermining-efforts-to-raise-birth-rates/5.5k
u/ScottishTurnipCannon 3d ago
Quietly undermining? Surely by now we're all painfully aware that we're steadily stripping away fundamental aspects of the human experience via work culture and cost of living.
Ask almost any potential parent why they're hesitant to have children and they'll tell you this immediately.
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u/ParadoxTrip 3d ago
Growing up I knew all my cousins, some second cousins, distant great uncles.
My nephews and nieces don't have that luxury due to their parents having waaaay less free time and that seems to be the norm in the NW UK at least.
It's not just stopping families from forming, it's stopping existing families from even knowing each other, it's all so sad
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u/huehuehuehuehuuuu 3d ago
It is sad. Grew up with my brother, a good number of cousins. Now none of us are in the same area, the same country even.
I barely know their kids. We no longer fully know the adults we’ve become. And given the state of everything, we are not having biological children. While other members of the family have fertility issues. One has housing issues. No replacement rate from this family group that’s for sure.
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u/TomTomMan93 2d ago
I didn't really know my cousins much (lived in a different part of the country from them) and that was as far back as the 90s and early 2000.
Now I live near none of my family and really couldn't fathom it, if for any reason, because they don't live in places I could be employed like I am where I currently live. I don't really want kids, but I'm also aware enough to know that even if my partner and I did want them, we couldn't afford to do it anyway due to time constraints from work and finances.
All of this is simply to say, I big agree with this thread here that work/jobs/careers have taken such a front seat to literally everything else that it's kind of eroded away most of what people actually get some baseline humanity from. It kind of sucks major ass
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u/Polar-Bear_Soup 2d ago
But have you thought about how the shareholders need your work to be completed and on time so they can continue to be rewarded for your hard work. Yeah, sure, you wanna have a family and a life and be able to enjoy the life you've created for yourself. But unfortunately, because of our hypercapitalist economy, we can't afford that.....
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u/Mister_Mighty_O 2d ago
It is sad, and I am saddened by the situation. My Mom is 1 of 7, my Dad is 1 of 10. At 47 now, many of my aunts and uncles have started to pass away. I lost an Uncle over the weekend and have had little time to grieve. I’ve returned from a short vacation where I saw that Uncle’s brother (obviously another Uncle on my Mom’s side) in another part of Canada, which is huge. However upon my return I get the distinct feeling that almost nobody cares about the time I would want/need for that loss, and let’s all get back to work, or our disparate communities and activities. Chop chop, life moves on.
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u/BakerIBarelyKnowHer 2d ago
And third places get more and more expensive and less and less friendly. Houses and rent are getting more expensive, rocketing up how often people are evicted and forced to move, meaning people can’t form roots in their neighborhood. And people are channeling the energy they would put into actual relationships into divisive, online political groups, causing even more fractures.
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u/ccaccus 2d ago
For my family, even holidays have very much become a “let’s get this over with”-ordeal. We used to play games and chat until late in the evening. Now it’s show up at 2, eat, and be home by 5 so they can… sit and watch TV? It’s all so bizarre.
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u/ishka_uisce 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's really true. My kid has cousins 45 mins away that we manage to see maybe four times a year.
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u/OpossomMyPossom 2d ago
Dang I never even consider this. I'm so thankful all the time for my large extended family. They bring so much joy to my life when we gather.
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u/PartyPorpoise 2d ago
My mom laments that I don’t know my family that well but like, we stopped seeing them once I hit my teen years. Of course I’m not gonna be attached.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 2d ago
"Wow my workforce has little motivation to have children when they're overworked, stressed, broke, and isolated from their community? Gee, that sure sucks, addressing any of that would hurt my profits"
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u/Dramatic_Explosion 2d ago
Caring about hours at work, wages, commute, housing, healthcare, those are all factors in being able to raise a family and none of that is on the table.
This is basically "We've discovered the problem and unfortunately there's nothing we're willing to do about it." Not that anyone is shocked by any of this.
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u/Psychic_Hobo 2d ago
Less discovered, more like "begrudgingly admitted"
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u/tahlyn 2d ago
Seriously, it drives me crazy every time there's a thread about this or a news article or some scientific research getting posted and the authorities act genuinely confused about why people aren't having children.
Just ask people and they will tell you.
People have been telling them for decades and they still pretend to be confused. I think you are on to something, it's very obvious why people aren't having children, they just don't want to admit it because doing something about it with impact next quarter's profits.
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u/_Thermalflask 2d ago
"But the pizza parties! We did SO MANY pizza parties, what more do the peasants WANT? Greedy asses!" says the CEO who earns like 10,000x what the average employee does
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u/washoutr6 2d ago
*would actually improve profits but execs don't feel that they do..... Literally would rather hurt people at the business expense.
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u/Drobotxx 2d ago
The honest answer is probably "I want to buy a house before I want I have kids, but I can't afford a house".
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u/DrMobius0 2d ago
Then you'll want to somewhat graduate from being house poor, because the act of buying a house will c o n s u m e your savings.
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u/Aacron 2d ago
Yep, bought in November, as broke as I was working fast food with 2 roommates, but at least 20% of my mortgage is equity.
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u/washoutr6 2d ago
This doesn't fix the problem either, nordic countries have been trying these approaches with no success.
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u/dougan25 2d ago
We've been saying this for YEARS.
The 40-hour work week was designed around one person working a job from 18-65 while their partner kept the home.
Every part of that has since broken down for the middle class.
Families can't survive on one income. The cost of living has skyrocketed, whereas the buying power of the middle class has stagnated or dropped.
Entering the workforce with a sustainable wage is hard enough, let alone find a job or field for life. You can't just sign on at the local factory and have a job for 30 years.
Few of us will be able to retire at 65
We have to try to "keep the home" with both people working 40+ hours a week.
Where exactly is a child (the most time-consuming and expensive investment a person will ever make) going to fit into this?
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u/nowake 2d ago
and then you've got salaried management jobs which pay 40 but expect 50-60 hours of work per week
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u/Raichu4u 2d ago
Honestly, who the hell are the people agreeing to these jobs! If I was ever salary and had to work a minute over 40 I would be clocking out.
And I'm not even in a place with too much job security. I'm entry level IT and I feel confident enough to turn that down.
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u/jayfear 2d ago
Partly to keep up with the rising cost of living, or they work in fields where you're just expected to ascend to management or there's something wrong with you.
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u/barontaint 2d ago
Depending on field of work it might not be much of an agreement. Whenever I started making too much hourly they would try to get me to salary. It ends up being a paycut because I was working 10-15hrs of overtime a week. Still would be working those same hours doing the same job but without overtime, it sucked. Oh and the real fun thing is some places then cut back your hours to 36hrs a week and no overtime if you don't take the lowball offer, super fun.
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u/washoutr6 2d ago
Doing it backwards, I became invaluable to the company and forced them to keep me hourly. But the con is certainly for them to hope you are dumb enough to take the "promotion". They might keep you at 36 for a few weeks but if they can't get another hire they will start to take metric hits and have to make up the work eventually.
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u/Ligma_Spreader 2d ago
I’ve been in IT for a long time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an hourly position that’s not entry level.
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u/nhtj 2d ago
You're entry level IT that's why you think of work as 'checking out'. Work can 'pause' for you and resume when you check in tomorrow.
In manufacturing/production jobs the customer or shipment doesn't care about you "checking out". Many factories function 24x7 and you are expected to be on demand at all times, atleast on phone/email.
If you're at a managerial position you HAVE to work extra hours with no overtime to meet deadlines and customer demands.
Someone else fucked up? Delay because of circumstances outside your control? You can't say 'not my probs I'm checking out'.
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u/Bakoro 2d ago
Also, most people can't afford houses in any major metropolitan area.
Just by myself, ignoring my partner's income, I'm at around the top 25ish percent of U.S household income. Every online mortgage calculator I've tried says that I couldn't afford a freestanding house, anywhere I'd want to live. I could barely afford an apartment.
So, according to corporate America, at least 75% of households can't afford to buy a house in a major metro without using some kind of generational wealth, or grossly overextending their financial position.
Even with an extremely aggressive retirement contribution, every online retirement calculator says that I'll be in for a tight retirement.
So, I'm supposedly well off, my household is supposedly well off, but we don't have new cars, we don't go on fancy vacations, and we still won't be able to afford to buy our own place for multiple years.
I don't see how people making less money are getting by, they can't save anything. Kids are so expensive.
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u/dougan25 2d ago
They aren't getting by. They're living within their paycheck to paycheck means, and the real crises won't hit until they're unable to get that paycheck and haven't saved.
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u/rmorrin 2d ago
Ive given up the idea of ever owning a home. Hell even just renting an apartment breaks the bank most of the time. My last apartment got bought out by a new landlord and they jacked the prices up by like 30-50% after people moved out. It's been 4 years and I guarantee his mortgage is paid off by us already. And this was one of the cheaper places to rent.(Well before he bought it)
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u/sparky8251 2d ago edited 2d ago
The 40-hour work week was designed around one person working a job from 18-65 while their partner kept the home.
It was also the compromise position between workers who caclulated the actual amount of hours they need to work each week to maintain societies demands for goods and services, and working 7 days a week 16 hours a day...
The workers wanted 20 hour weeks, the capitalists offered 40 as a compromise to make people go back to work.
That was made back in the early 1900s, when individual worker productivity was way less than now! Even 20 hours a week is likely excessive amounts of work if all we need to do is meet societal demand with our work. Evidence is actually around too, that shows most workers maybe work like 12 hours a week right now despite having to be in the office for 40.
Imagine how much better life would be if we worked 3 or 4 4 hour days a week and got the same pay as the usual 40 hour job today... Thats what we do now anyways, we just pretend we need 40 hours to get the pay because...
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u/safely_beyond_redemp 2d ago
You mean you don't want to have a job and then have a whole other job of raising children and expect to also somehow find happiness in the few minutes a year you get to yourself? Are you not a beast of burden?
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u/gkazman 2d ago
Work 40 (actually closer to 50 hours because hustle culture) a week, drive an hour each way, wake up 2 hours before work starts, get home, eat, ... when exactly are people supposed to have time FOR kids. Not even considering that they cost something like a $1M to raise (at least somewhat properly, though I am not a parent), and so in a 16 hour day, you spend what, 12 of that working, traveling to work, or coming back from work?
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u/Xaielao 2d ago
Not to mention 15k a year per kid for daycare.
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u/cableshaft 2d ago
More than that in a lot of places. I'm not even sure I could find daycare that cheap in the midwest (I haven't had to look yet, as I don't have children, but I've heard stories from friends and family who have paid for it, and it seems to be higher than that).
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u/qwertyslayer 2d ago
Oh, but there are so many more than 16 hours in a day...
(parent of a toddler, please send help we are all tired)
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u/Yuzumi 2d ago
Yeah, I've never wanted kids, but the only people who seem to not understant this concept are the rich assholes on TV complaining about "low birthrates", usually as barely veiled racism or concerns about a "labor shortage" (read: "we won't be able to exploit workers as much as we do now!")
Even if I wanted kids there is nothing in the way society is built that incentivizes that. Childcare is expensive, especially good childcare, there isn't nearly enough parental leave for when you have a kid, and with how crap education was from republican cuts even before they finally sent it to a farm how are people supposed to get their kids an education.
Again, the only people who complain about "low birthrates" in the west at least are just racist, exploitive, or creepy. Usually all three. A lot of them just see women as chattel.
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u/Lady-Seashell-Bikini 2d ago
Even my sister who has one child is hesitant to have more! If childcare was more affordable or if she and her husband were given more paid paternity leave, I could see them having at least 3 children, but I don't see that happening in this political climate.
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u/ArchmageXin 3d ago
Then on top there is how AI taking our jobs, pollution will end the planet, assume a war don't destroy as all.
I have children of my own, and every night I have visions of how my children will survive in the coming uncertainty. How do you expect younger generation to want have children at all??
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u/Spicy1 3d ago
Same and so cannot imagine an optimistic future for them. It’s breaking my soul
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u/gonesnake 2d ago
I'm an older fellow and a number of people have asked me why I don't have any children. I always say "this isn't a party I would invite anyone to".
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u/brentsg MS | Mechanical Engineering 2d ago
All this. I love my kids, but there's zero chance I'd have them if I know what I know now.
They haven't asked me what I think of them having kids and maybe they never ask. It's their choice and I'll withhold my feelings if they don't.
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u/theedgeofoblivious 2d ago
I am so glad I never had kids.
I would never want to subject anyone to this place.
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u/PreachWaterDrinkWine 2d ago
I tell mine all the time not to have kids ever. And I explain why. Hopefully they understand.
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u/Future_Burrito 2d ago
Why is it so obvious yet no one does anything?
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u/WirbelwindFlakpanzer 2d ago
Because the ones responsible for this are those in power who profit from it.
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u/DrMobius0 2d ago
They're also deeply out of touch with regular people problems. Working 12 hours a day is very different for us peons than it is for the wealthy guy who gets to rake in the actual money. The owners are the ones who get all the profit. When they do good work, they get to actually benefit from the line going up. Then they go their spotless home (cleaned by someone else), have a meal (cooked by someone else), and do whatever they want without a care. They don't understand our problems.
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u/Jesse-359 2d ago
The idea of 'work' for most CEOs these days is showing up to an executive meeting or two each week, gladhanding investors on the golf course, and schmoozing them over expensive dinners.
They'll then tell you they are working 16 hour days and deserve tens of millions of dollars of salary or stocks, because their endless golf and dinner socializing is 'work'.
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u/washoutr6 2d ago
Yeah it's never been work, it's just a bunch of insider trading and the poor people are not invited.
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u/felrain 2d ago
You need the dragons hoarding gold to give up the potential of even more gold. Surprisingly difficult when all you can do is ask nicely.
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u/Jesse-359 2d ago
There are actually other more direct ways to deal with dragons, traditionally speaking...
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u/RadBadTad 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's a systemic problem that no individual can solve. It's our culture, and it's driven by the foundational demands of capitalism. You can't just turn it off. This is the end result of everything that's been built for the last 70 years and to go back, we'd have to erase what a lot of people view to be our "progress" to where we've gotten as a society.
A company that has shareholders is legally obligated to do whatever brings the greatest profit, and therefore the greatest return on investment for those shareholders. A leader who doesn't follow through on that gets replaced. And if we take the stock market out of the equation for our companies, the entire world economy vanishes in the blink of an eye.
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u/-Ch4s3- 2d ago
Probably because the solution isn't actually obvious. Estonia has one the lower birth rates in Europe at 1.31, while having more than 6 months of guaranteed paid maternity leave with additional leave available up to about 400 days. They also have free guaranteed early childhood education starting at 18 months. Estonians also work on average about 34 hours a week, and have a maximum 48hrs in a 7 day span allowed by law. Yet, their birth rate is declining year after year.
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u/Prof_Acorn 2d ago
Wendigos only think about devouring, and think anyone who keeps them from devouring is an enemy.
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u/maxofreddit 2d ago
It's just crazy to me.
In the US, school sports and the like are in on it too. Spring Break? Perfect time for a basketball tournament! Three day weekend, looks great for a dance convention!
I'm not Christian in practice, but it sure would be nice if everything was closed on Sundays like it was years ago. Sometimes the only way you can take time off is if EVERYONE is taking the time off.
Just having ANY energy at the end of the day would be a amazing.
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u/Jesse-359 2d ago
That was actually one of the major points of Sundays - was to make it functionally illegal to have 7 day work weeks by sanctifying one of those days.
Would be nice if we could enforce that through secular law rather than having to fall back on dogmatic superstition to achieve that however - but there is a constant and relentless push from business leaders to always do away with any such restrictions on their activity.
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u/maxofreddit 2d ago
Funny how even the dogmatic of millennia ago realized that people needed a day. Heck, even God supposedly needed one.
Where are the Christian Nationalists on this one, eh?
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u/barontaint 2d ago
Yeah but most stores close 5-6pm on weekdays around me and even the restaurants close by 9pm M-Thurs post covid. So your plan is to close everything on one day that regular 9-5 M-F people can get to stuff? Who on earth is that honestly helping out, certainly not the majority of workers?
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u/maxofreddit 2d ago
Yeah, that was always weird to me as well...that every one works, and therefore everything is open at the same time...so you actually can't go anywhere to buy/do the things because you're working.
Probably made more sense when only one person had to work, and the other could run around and get the errands done.
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u/DrMobius0 2d ago
We are aware, but the freaks that run your life who don't have to cook for themselves or run their own errands have no idea what problems regular folk encounter in their day to day. This study isn't for us.
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u/JJMcGee83 2d ago
Yeah I won't even get a dog because I don't have the time to devote to taking care of it, I'm certainly not going to have a child.
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u/SierraBravo94 2d ago edited 2d ago
this topic is 90% a cost of living issue and maybe 10% work culture issue.
people had lots of children during the industrial revolution where they and their children where working +12hour shifts.Wages today are a sick joke if you look at the numbers of billionaires and millionaires.
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u/AnnualAct7213 2d ago
The honest answer is that there's a whole lot of different problems all contributing to people not wanting to have kids. It isn't one thing that magically needs to be fixed and then people will start popping out kids like there's no tomorrow.
I don't want kids because.... I don't want kids. The desire to have them is absent. There is no other reason.
Here in Denmark we don't have anywhere near the same scale of economic problems that people like to cite as reasons not to have kids. Childcare is affordable, wages are good, housing is relatively affordable (outside of Copenhagen) and we have good safety and support networks, but people are still having less children than they used to, despite many saying they want them.
But the fact that I am likely to die well before retirement in the societal collapse of climate change that we are doing absolutely nothing to slow down or adapt to is certainly a good reason not to put kids into the world, regardless of any economic concerns.
Loss of community and the loneliness epidemic is another. A good chunk of the generation that are in their prime to have kids right now are completely lost in social media addictions and the despair of doomscrolling. It's a serious issue, one which is finally starting to see some pushback as schools and parents seek to restrict the time their kids spend on phones so that maybe the next generation to reach adulthood will have learned how to interact with life without the aid of an app. I personally don't think it's the smartphone that's the problem, but the design of modern apps, but that's beside the point.
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u/Electrical_Bake_6804 2d ago
This is exactly it. I am in the USA. My partner and I have masters degrees. Neither of us make 6 figures. We cannot afford to have a child. We cannot afford childcare. It’s hard to make time for things a child needs, like daycare pick ups and drop offs, doctors appointments, etc. Work is life. It sucks. I always wanted kids. My window is too small now and with our current leader, it ain’t happening.
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u/AppropriateBridge2 3d ago
A demanding work culture could be quietly undermining efforts to raise birth rates
Quietly?
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u/shitholejedi 3d ago edited 3d ago
None of these claims even offer a scratch on the issue with birth rates otherwise Scandinavian and South American countries would have the inverse birth rates they have now.
Finland with one of the most robust child welfare programs in the world and one of the lowest average female work hours has the same birth rate as Japan and marginally better than China.
Quietly is probably the apt term since work hours globally have yet to yield causation with birth rates.
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u/erissays 2d ago edited 2d ago
People seemingly just don't want to acknowledge that lower birth rates are in large part a result of women having the ability and freedom to actually choose whether or not they want to have children.
For thousands of years, medical, legal, and cultural realities meant women largely had no say in how big their families were going to be or when those families would start. Pregnancy and childbirth is a long and traumatic process, raising a child is expensive and time-consuming no matter what incentives you provide to parents, and both of those things force you to re-evaluate and change your entire lifestyle. Worldwide changes and medical advances re: birth control, abortion, marriage, and legal equality of the sexes has tipped the scales towards a future where women who don't want children, are neutral to the idea, or simply not ready for parenthood can make the choice to delay having them or not have them at all...and overwhelmingly when they have a choice, they choose one of those options.
In the long-term, this is actually a good thing because on average it means happier families, fewer abused children, and a more stable workforce curve, but in the short-term it's a very very painful impending demographic cliff that people keep trying to solve without realizing it's an unsolvable problem unless you are either pro-immigration or you want to reverse the clock on 100 years of medical and cultural advancement.
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u/shitholejedi 2d ago
Yes. A major part is choice to delay, minor is choice not to have kids. We have multi-country data points that show most childless women in their lates 30s and early forties decided to delay having children not to being childless. Roughly 10%-20% consistently state they actually wanted to be childless. IVF rates are rising consistently across countries even less developed ones.
There isn't a stable workforce curve in the long term. That is one thing every government is struggling with at the moment. This alone will put countries back 50 years if its not solved.
The only curve that has held steady is the kids now remains an either rich or poor thing. Middle class people are declining from that stack.
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u/flakemasterflake 2d ago
Yeah the birth rate has ticked up for women over 35. The birth rate is going down bc people are having 1 kid in their late 30s or are just not having the kid they want
It's really not a matter of childfree "by choice"
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u/clubby37 2d ago
just not having the kid they want
"Junior is such a disappointment, I just can't bear to roll those dice again!"
(I know you meant not having as many kids as they want, it was just kind of funny as written.)
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u/nottoday2017 2d ago
I also wonder how many people have a path like mine where they delay kids to get established, find it harder to have them due to fertility issues in the mid 30s, and then have sort of gotten comfortable not having them. I think some people who were 50/50 about kids in their 20s might tip over to being child free the longer they don’t have children and are enjoying themselves. That definitely happened to me, I’m now solidly in the child free camp, happy with my life, and just don’t feel like undertaking the multiple years of dice rolling that is having a child. The comfy has won haha.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 2d ago
Why do these studies never analyze the erosion of local community to see if there is a correlation between birth rates?
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u/AnRealDinosaur 2d ago
We've only spent our entire evolutionary history raising children communally. Two people living alone, each needing to work 40+ hours to still be broke should be fine.
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u/dread_pudding 2d ago
This is a really good counterpoint. It certainly is a problem for those of us who would like kids, that our current labor culture is unsustainable. That deserves discussion.
But also.... having kids just sucks. In a lot of ways. The argument that it's a labor problem has always made me feel a little weird because I'm one of those folks who simply doesn't want to experience childbirth, or the interruption to life a child would bring. Even in the countries with the greatest indicators of wellbeing, the connection between education level and low childbirth holds strong, likely because the educated have found fulfillment in other sources than having kids, and are aware of the real toll kids can take.
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u/shitholejedi 2d ago
In the developed world, on average, the TFR goes poor, rich then middle class. The wealthy currently have more kids than middle class people. And in specific EU regions with those high indicators of well being, birth rate increases by income percentile.
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u/dread_pudding 1d ago
You know this makes a lot of sense and speaks to the labor/economic issue, since the upper class can afford the help to have a relatively lower-stress child raising experience.
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u/Masa67 1d ago
Yes, but that doesnt necessarily contradict the argument of ‘choice’. The poor usually lack education and other resources to decide whether or not to have kids. The educated middle class have the choice to not have kids and take it, because kids are hard work+they know they cannot give them the best possible life. The rich have the choice to have kids, since having kids when u are rich is obv significantly easier. U can afford nanies and stay at home parenting, u know i can provide all the best options for your child in all areas…
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u/DemiserofD 2d ago
That's probably why evolution basically has created a system whereby we have the majority of our kids before we're fully emotionally and psychologically mature. Except we've spent the better part of the last century convincing people not to have kids then, and then we get surprised when nobody has any kids.
Getting pregnant is objectively a terrible choice for at least a good while after it happens. It just feels really good. You basically need people who value the short-term benefit over the long-term cost, and only someone without a fully-developed brain does that - at least, enough to sustain the species.
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u/Some_Number_8516 2d ago
It's entirely likely that the optimal amount of humans on this planet is much lower than where it is today. Population decline is a problem because the world got WAY more efficient at producing food in the early-to-mid 20th century and the population spiked as a result, creating a glut of people that are beginning to age out. The modern attitude towards children is a direct result of this process, too. Up until the 1900s, you could have a family of 10 and multiple kids could die before childbirth. It wasn't until most kids started surviving childhood that family sizes decreased.
Individual nations do not exist in a vacuum either. Finland has excellent policies, but their people are still influenced by fears of climate change, fears of their neighbor Russia, etc. There are a lot of reasons to not have children, or a lot of children, and humanity is collectively solving very little of those problems.
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u/Zaptruder 2d ago
Exactly.
We're drowning here... if not in work, stress and just trying to meet our basic needs and wants, then in the realization that our future is not compatible with having children.
Who wants to have kids, increase work load, increase costs, only to have them face a declining world where facism has left a deep mark, where climate chaos continues to intensify, and economic inequality has grown totally out of hand with significant assistance (as in nails in the coffin) from AI boom?
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u/shitholejedi 2d ago
We are not optimal by any standards of the word.
There is a reason every single developed nation is tweaking its immigration policies because the underlying economic structure that allows your current standard of living hasn't changed from requiring '10 kids.' It has just changed from them being your kids to a 'societal pool' of kids.Your current standard of living is currently on the fiscal backs of a future generation.
Finnish women are not putting up child because they note Russia is an issue. We have cold war birthrates to show that is nowhere a factor. We also have actual wartorn countries currently disproving that.
And your last line stands directly in contrast with your first paragraph. Humanity solved the childhood mortality rate, the claim that everyone is standing by with current problems isn't also borne by any data on historical trends.
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u/Aacron 2d ago
Birth control
The human psyche subconsciously understands the concept of carrying capacity and that we're over the line
Basically the only set of points that makes sense to me.
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u/giant_albatrocity 2d ago
I’m pretty sure the people of South Korea have been talking pretty loudly about this for a while now.
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u/Ab47203 3d ago
This was obvious to ANYONE who's worked over 40 hours in a week.
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u/justanotherdudeiam 2d ago
I'm so tired of working more than 40 hours a week. I'm a single guy in my early 30s and I'm already sick of it, and I already know I have it easy compared to people with kids. I've only done it anymore to get ahead on my bills and savings, and damn it's exhausting.
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u/Extension_Hat_2325 2d ago
You're getting ahead? Nice. I'm just running two pennies together at the end of the month, basically. I don't say this to one up you, but just to share my experience. 40 hours doesn't even cut it these days for a lot of people.
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u/gaedikus 2d ago
"Hey, most of your waking hours are consumed by work, why not have a lifelong commitment which requires a lot of additional work and time away from work which you'll likely have to make up later? and have we mentioned the cost? it's expensive!"
pass.
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u/CurrencyUser 3d ago
And not to mention the cost of living for a similar standard of living 30-40 years ago demands more hours. Vicious trap.
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u/aDarkDarkNight 3d ago
Even though we have enough technology now to do the vast majority of what we need done without human labour involved. Clearly the system we are using needs a dramatic update.
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u/ElKuMaRrR 3d ago
Too bad it wont happend in our lifetime
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u/Subparnova79 3d ago
Yes because everyone is distracted by circuses and bread
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u/Rocktopod 2d ago
It might. Things often need to get a lot worse before this kind of change can happen, and lately they've been getting worse very quickly.
As much as I don't want another World War, it might be the only thing that can bring about this kind of dramatic societal change. And it might happen in our lifetimes.
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u/taggospreme 2d ago
The Victorian era is alien as a society compared to modern day. And that was after industrial revolution changed society. It seems like drastically-upsetting technological development causes pressure/strife in the societal/world order. And that tension later manifests as massive conflicts, and then a course correction afterward.
The internet hit us and we haven't yet had a course correction, then AI dropped and now there are two things putting pressure on correction. Definitely going to be another world war.
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u/washoutr6 2d ago
What do you mean going to be, we've been in ww3 for years, it just turned out to be low intensity.
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u/Ajax746 2d ago
Honestly it kind of has to happen in our lifetime. Society in its current form is completely unsustainable. I personally thing a societal reset happens in the next 20-30 years give that insane pace of technological advancement and how much those technologies are fundamentally changing our world.
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u/tollbearer 3d ago
The average chinese worker is definitely living in way better conditions than 40 years ago.
What we're missing is that civilization was always incompatible with health fertility rates, it's just that we didn't have reliable contraceptives, or bodily autonomy for most women, until about 50 years ago.
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u/queenringlets 2d ago
Exactly. Now that people have a choice not to get pregnant especially when married or in a LTR some of them chose not to. Of course fertility will decrease.
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u/Nepit60 3d ago
We should move to 20 hour weeks.
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u/GreenGorilla8232 2d ago
We already have the means do this, but roughly 80 people own half the world's wealth.
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 3d ago
Many of us may be forced into 0 hours over the next few years, or at best, 20 hours for 50% pay.
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u/xeromage 2d ago
The numbers on the paycheck won't go down... just the value of the currency it represents.
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u/Quite_Likes_Hormuz 2d ago
They're saying that even if we manage to bring the working week down to 20 hours, workers will not be compensated and will make half as much.
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u/SurfinInFL 2d ago
We should move to 20 hour weeks.
I too remember when they said we would have a reduced work week. Don't feel bad, I fell for it too
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u/STLtachyon 3d ago
Who would have thunk that raising children requires a lot of manhours and money, especially in their early years. This combined with the lack of traditional assistance from extended family members in many developed countries and the fact that most jobs cant support a single income household and you have people thinking twice about having kids.
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u/spinbutton 3d ago
A lot of people in China and the US live away from their extended families. I think having no support network (or needing to build one from scratch) factors in.
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u/DemiserofD 2d ago
That perspective is challenged by the fact that Scandinavian countries also have extremely low birthrates, despite offering better assistance and child support than anywhere else in the world. Virtually universally, more wealth leads to less children, not more - at least, until parents are making something like a million dollars a year. And even then, it only increases slowly until you're one of those crazy billionaires with 5 ex-wives.
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u/Sloogs 2d ago
I think part of the problem is that in a developed country children are a net drain on pretty much every resource for a solid 18-22 years.
In agrarian societies, large families can add labour and resources.
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u/STLtachyon 2d ago
Yeah, my following comment says just that, people in rich countries have less kids. It isn't a simple issue to solve nor does it have exactly one cause, but the current financial instability that many people face today and especially lack of affordable housing, certainly isnt helping the overall image. More money typically mean more hobbies so people can find fulfillment elsewhere and can even see kids as a burden.
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u/Maycrofy 2d ago
"financial strain will continue until birthrates improve"
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u/DemiserofD 2d ago
Interestingly, that does seem to work, statistically. The poorer you are, the more kids you tend to have.
Honestly, I'm increasingly inclined to think it's the upper-level solution. Just let wages fall enough and people will start having more kids.
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u/Consistent_Log_3040 2d ago
yea isn't education tied to how many kids someone has?
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u/LocustUprising 2d ago
The wage slaves must continue reproducing, or the infinite growth of big business might cease
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u/Anxious-Note-88 3d ago
Something people don’t ever talk about - from a very early age it was drilled into us that having a baby was one of the most, if not the most difficult things in the world. In health class we had to take home one of those fake robot baby dolls which would cry throughout the night. It was a great strategy which really brought down teen pregnancy, but (confused pikachu face) very few people from my graduating class of 400+ students have children, and we’re now in our 30s.
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u/The_Philosophied 3d ago
I’m 30 and what turned me off from parenthood was just…looking around and seeing parents constantly look miserable, complaining, burned out etc. Why on earth would I sign up for something like that??? And the economy is just getting worse, the political future of our country is looking very precarious and scary…
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u/puffadda 3d ago
Not to mention that our existing population is already clearly well beyond what the environment can sustain at anywhere near our current living standards.
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u/Monteze 2d ago
Yea I always feel that I am the odd one. Any other mammal of our size with this population would not be considered at risk. If we naturally let us taper down to a """"few""""" billion thats fine if it means we all have a better standard of living.
We have an problem in resource distribution and governing not a populace one.
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u/Zilhaga 2d ago
I'm late genx and we heard about looming overpopulation as kids all the time, and I'm sure the millennials did, too. Add that to work culture, the rising cost of essentials like housing/childcare/education, the growing fascism, total indifference to climate change, and is it any wonder people are having fewer kids?
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u/Monteze 2d ago
Yea I am smack in the middle millenial and heard it too. Kids are hard, so many people and few resources. Gotta grind all day and night, rely on no one. Don't have kids if you can't afford them. Then suddenly, why no kids?
Honestly, even if I didn't hate my genetics I have to really struggle to come up with a good reason to have kids that isn't "My ego demands it."
We have plenty of people, the worlds in a scary state an in the US they are gutting any help parents get and we have a system that is anti family unit. e.g single family housing and suburban planning.
So yea. No good reason to have a kid for me.
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u/PeatLover2704 2d ago
Capitalism can't survive if the workforce doesn't increase. Line must go up, after all.
Also most of the "declining birthrate" panic is racist.
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u/Monteze 2d ago
Yea when we pretend line have to go up or bad then I can see manufactured panic backed by the "replacement theory" BS peddled by people who haaappeeenn to be racist.
Humanity would be fine even if we """only""" had 1 billion people. Because if we don't naturally find a balance and have a soft fall nature will force a hard fall.
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u/PartyPorpoise 2d ago
99% of thr population could drop dead right now and the human species still wouldn’t be in danger of extinction. Not saying that we need a mass die-off, just pointing out that our population number is absolutely massive for an animal our size.
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u/Tetrachroma_ 2d ago
Parenthood is inherently difficult but worth it because you ultimately gain a family.
Give humanity a reason to be optimistic about the future. Give people economic options. Provide parents the resources and specifically time to create a family. If any combination of those three are available people will have children, guaranteed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought mammals willingness to reproduce was directly associated with resource availability? Haven't we studied this?
No resources. No children.
Resources. Families.
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u/DangerousTurmeric 2d ago
I mean if we compensated women for the labour involved in gestating babies, and the enormous risk to their health, you might get more women to have more kids. But that would be very expensive and the real problem is not that fewer women are having children, it's that women who have kids are having far fewer. Two generations ago it was normal to have 5 or 6 per woman, my gran had 12, now 2 is the max most people will go to. And I don't see that increasing.
Everywhere women have a choice, regardless of resources, they choose to have fewer children. Even one birth means a 40% chance of a woman developing a chronic health condition. And two in every 10,000 births leads to the death of a women. And even women who work full time are still expected to do more housework, with the gap increasing with more children What possible reason could you give someone to convince them to have the 4+ kids needed to actually get the fertility rate high enough?
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u/The_Philosophied 2d ago
I feel like the ultimate reality is that the labor of reproduction and child rearing will have to be acknowledged as such and rewarded in our capitalist global economy because at the end of the day why do we expect women to just…birth human capital unpaid? Like that’s actually INSANE!
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u/jacksprat1952 2d ago
Something I've noticed is that I basically get the exact same opinion on children from two distinctly different groups of friends: the ones who already have children and the ones who have no interest in having children at all.
My friends who do have children just love to ask my wife and I, "Aren't you guys excited to have one of your own?" whenever their kids are crying, screaming, misbehaving, etc. Some friends of ours who have three children (ages 4, 2, and an infant) invited us to their house for brunch, and holy crap, both of them seemed like they were at their wits' end by the time we left. My wife constantly hears about how expensive everything that their kids need is.
Meanwhile, my friends who have no interest at all in children (several of my guy friends have gone ahead and gotten vasectomies) are basically of the opinion that children are insanely stressful and costly to have, so they'll pass.
It really seems like the only selling point that the pro-children crowd can come up with is the "you'll never know love like you will for your child," but that's just waaaaaaaay to nebulous of a gamble for a lot of people to take nowadays.
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u/Jesse-359 2d ago
Oh please. If there's one social-statistical correlation in our world that is painfully obvious even at a glance, it is the correlation between the maturity of industrialized market economies and a precipitous drop in birth rates - this occurs regardless of the culture of the nation or group. They can be authoritarian, democratic, or religious zealots - it doesn't matter, the result is the same.
All our countries become focused on abstract concepts like Productivity, GDP, and Stock valuations, which have very little to do with real life - but they drive most of our behavior to an almost fanatical degree, and we're not really permitted to opt out of it.
Because raising children in no way relates to any of these abstract measure of success, children become an 'undesirable externality' to the entire system. An unproductive waste of time and resources according to the metrics of our economies.
Because these economies are so blindly focused on productivity and efficiency, this means that they are actively working to prevent us from having children. They squeeze laborers for as much time and productivity as possible, for as little pay as possible, and the end result is a system in which almost everyone is too poor in money and/or time to raise children. This isn't rocket science.
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u/Frickin_Bats 2d ago
Your comment brought me back to a class I took in my MBA program. The topic of the course was about systems dynamics from a business standpoint, exploring how feedback loops in a dynamic system influence future behaviors and outcomes. I took away a lot from that class, but one concept that really stuck with me is how a poorly chosen key performance indicator can result in unintended long-term consequences, because beginning to measure any particular kpi introduces feedback into the system which influences future behavior. So it is important to plan ahead strategically when deciding to measure a new kpi, giving consideration as to the behavior that is desired from the introduction of the new feedback loop.
TL;DR - measuring the wrong thing can be just as damaging (or worse) as not measuring anything at all.
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u/Jesse-359 2d ago
Ayup - there's a reason that money is sometimes referred to as the 'root of all evil'.
It's not quite that, but there is no question that the invention of abstract value in the form of currency unleashed an unending Pandora's Box of unintended consequences that have snowballed throughout the history of human civilization.
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u/SockGnome 3d ago
Yes. The oligarchs who keep screaming about low birthrates aren’t doing anything to make a society worth living in and bringing new life into the world. When you have both parents working hard struggling why add to the stress?
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u/wdjm 3d ago
Ya think?
Why on Earth would anyone want to have kids they wouldn't have any time to care for?
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine 3d ago
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19485565.2024.2422850
Abstract
China’s fertility rate continues to decline despite government fertility policies. This study aims to explore the micro-level causes of China’s declining fertility rate by examining the impact of changes in Chinese work patterns in recent years, particularly the prevalence of overtime work, on fertility intentions. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study examines the impact of overtime work on fertility intentions at both the provincial and urban levels. It also examines the specific mechanisms through which different types of overtime (e.g. weekend overtime, night shifts, on-call duty) affect fertility intentions. The results show that overtime work significantly inhibits fertility intentions, a trend that is consistent at both provincial and urban levels. Weekend overtime, night shifts, and on-call duties exhibit particularly pronounced inhibitory effects on fertility intentions. However, not all work arrangements negatively impact fertility intentions. Reasonable work schedules may even foster them. The research implies the need for policy measures to mitigate the negative effects of overtime work on fertility intentions.
From the linked article:
A demanding work culture could be quietly undermining efforts to raise birth rates
China’s falling birth rate has become a major national concern, and a new study published in Biodemography and Social Biology suggests that the country’s demanding work culture may be partly to blame. The research shows that working more than 40 hours a week significantly reduces people’s desire to have children. Overtime, night shifts, and being constantly on call make it harder for people to imagine balancing work and family life — a finding that has important implications for future population policies.
The results were clear: overtime work had a strong and statistically significant negative effect on fertility intentions. This pattern held across nearly every province and city analyzed. The more hours people worked beyond the standard 40-hour week, the less likely they were to say they planned to have children in the near future. This trend was especially pronounced for people working 40–50 hours per week, where fertility intentions dropped the most sharply. Those working more than 60 hours a week showed more varied responses, but the overall effect was still negative.
When the researchers broke down working hours into smaller segments, they found that moderate work schedules — especially those between 0 and 20 hours per week — were actually associated with higher fertility intentions. Between 20 and 40 hours, the effect was mixed: some people were more willing to have children as hours increased, while others were not. But once work passed the 40-hour threshold, the negative effects on fertility became much stronger.
The type of overtime also mattered. People who regularly worked on weekends, at night, or were expected to be reachable 24/7 were significantly less likely to plan for children. These types of schedules interfere not just with physical rest, but also with family and social life. Weekend work and night shifts disrupt routines, reduce time with partners, and can create chronic fatigue. Being constantly on-call added another layer of stress, keeping people mentally tethered to their jobs even during off hours. The authors suggest that this erosion of personal time leaves little room for planning or raising a family.
There were also differences based on gender and marital status. Women showed a stronger negative response to overtime than men, suggesting that long hours may be especially burdensome for women who still shoulder more of the childcare and household responsibilities. Unmarried individuals were also more affected than those who were already married, possibly because they are still in the phase of life where fertility decisions are more flexible.
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u/wildmonster91 2d ago
We wokemore that 17th century phesants. We were told modern science would reduce pur work load but they just load it on in the name of short term profits.
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u/sailingtroy 2d ago
The number one thing your children need after food, water and shelter is your time.
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u/rivensoweak 2d ago
its almost as if 40 hour work week was designed with 1 parent staying at home, because thats totally realistic now a days am i rite
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u/7URB0 2d ago edited 2d ago
Why tf would anyone working 40hr weeks have kids? When I was full-time, I barely had time to fckin feed myself and do laundry, and I'm supposed to take care of a fckin BABY?!
Yeah, lemme just bring new life screaming into the world, a new life that I will only see occasionally on holidays, who someone else will raise for a paycheck. Imagine how fcked up your childhood must be when your closest bonded caretaker is an employee who your "real" parents can fire at any time for any reason.
No wonder the world is so fcked rn...
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u/jmwmcr 3d ago
Me and my wife will never have kids. They are expensive, stressful to manage and they hamper your career as you need to consider loads of additional factors in where you live work etc and lets face it we get one life we might aswell enjoy it. It's hard enough on a dual income to even buy a home let alone add another human into the mix. And thats even working 40 hours a week in a western economy with remote working forget it with overtime. In alot of societies the only valid way to raise kids properly is to be a single high income household which just isn't feasible for 99 percent of households but was the norm in alot of countries a few decades ago. Asia in particular doesn't seem to get it that you can't flog everyone with overwork and poor salaries and then expect them to do anything other than work and enjoy what limited social time they have. And before anyone jumps down my throat on this i worked in China for a couple of years and my mates were frequently working at 11pm even on weekends even when out with us at the bar etc. I got virtually no holiday and even that was double what my chinese colleagues got and nobody got any sick leave. Arguably society needs to do more to provide tax incentives, income supplements, reduce costs of child care, reduce costs of housing and offer more flexible work and benefits if they want to reverse declining birthrates under these conditions.
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u/Senven 3d ago
My ex and I wanted kids but the worry was quality of life for those kids.
TBH I don't know what the solutions tried out internationally are, but maybe socializing child rearing helps?
I imagine those working less than 20 hours a week are either financially well off (stay at home parents) or completely destitute.
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u/CarrotsStuff 2d ago
Another argument for the 4 day workweek
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u/AnRealDinosaur 2d ago
"10 hours a day it is!"
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u/Asisreo1 2d ago
It actually probably would be better that way, too. You don't have to waste as much time getting mentally/physically prepared for work and you still get the three days off. 2 hours a day doesn't feel all that worse in comparison to a single whole other day of the week.
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u/dandycribbish 2d ago
Slaves to our work for billionaires and corporations who do not value our lives or our time. Under paid, under funded and under appreciated, we are expected to suffer and then appreciate that we aren't fired for simply doing to job as required and not giving the rest of our time. The productivity will never be enough to satisfy the people in charge as they are so far removed from the process that they legitimately have no context of how lower class people live their lives.
Then they have the audacity to scream and complain when we don't want to create more wage slaves that we will raise in poverty to struggle through early life to only be dragged into the same machine.
You don't need a degree. You don't even need to have basic problem-solving skills to understand how we are being abused on a human level. The people in charge no longer see us as people. It won't change until they are forced.
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u/jert3 2d ago
Why would slaves want to doom their children to a life of slavery? If the vast majority of your production is going to a small cabal of extremely rich, and their is no chance to escape that cycle, then of course your going to be less inclined to have children with such a standard of living.
We've gotten to the points where Chinese factories have installed nets on the outside to reduce the number of suicides. That's no way to live, and its entirely due to every year, more of all wealth is concentrated in fewer hands.
AI and the soon coming autonomonous androids that will replace most human done jobs will have to be the turning point where we move on from out 19th century desgined economic systems predacated on infinite growth in a world of infinite resources and no pollution.
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u/EarthDwellant 3d ago
If I was 20 instead of 67 the condition of the world would cause me to absolutely not have children in any country. I guess the MagaNazi Party of the USA will soon require 2.2 births per couple before 25 years of age.
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u/FoolOnDaHill365 2d ago
Another sad aspect to this I haven’t seen mentioned is what about the loving relationship between the parents? I’m married with child, my wife and I work a ton, we have day care. We spend time with our child as much as possible but the thing that really suffers is my wife and my relationship. We haven’t had a night alone since he was born and if we did we would probably just sleep. It’s no wonder divorces are so common.
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u/bsievers BS | Applied Physics | Electronics | Minor in Evol. Anthro. 2d ago
"A demanding work culture could be quietly undermining efforts to raise birth rates"
QUIETLY!? I literally almost always hear that folks arent having kids because they can't afford them. Demanding work culture is LOUDLY the issue.
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u/xanas263 3d ago edited 3d ago
It is almost certainly one factor, but it is one of many factors. Declining birthrates is a phenomenon seen across pretty much every country outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
From what evidence we have even countries with the most pro-natal policies and environments are seeing limited to no benefits in having those policies and environments compared to countries with the most restrictive pro-natal environments. Which points to one or multiple underlying issues which we have yet to discover or factor in.
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u/MajesticBread9147 3d ago
Which points to one or multiple underlying issues which we have yet to discover or factor in.
Isn't it because regardless children are generally a net negative with regards to finances?
Like, if you straight up paid people $20k a year per child that would about break even, but no country to the best of my knowledge does that.
Also some people presumably just don't want children.
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u/welshwelsh 2d ago
If that was the reason, I would expect that countries that provide free childcare and better support would have higher birth rates, but they don't. Also, the richer someone is the less likely they are to have kids, even though wealthier people should have an easier time dealing with the financial cost.
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u/Hendlton 2d ago
No country has places that will raise your children for you. Yeah, some childcare is free in some places, but you still have to spend hours with your children, you still have to feed them, buy clothes, buy diapers, deal with school stuff, make sure they socialize, etc.
Like the comment above says, they're a detriment to people's lives no matter how you look at it. Even if literally everything related to having children was covered by the state, the responsibility of having a child can't be.
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u/MAMark1 2d ago
It will always be hard to have perfect data since there are so many factors that could influence this. You'd want two cohorts with nearly identical characteristics except for free childcare in one and not the other to really assess what the impact is.
My hunch is that countries with free healthcare would have even worse birth rates without it. But there are probably also aspects of overall CoL, education level, average career attainment for both men and women, population density, etc that come into play.
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u/tollbearer 3d ago
Occams razor says it's just modern contraceptives and womens bodily and economic autonomy.
Prior to these, especially effective female contraceptives, people had little choice but to have kids. I would strongly suspect 90%, maybe more, of all people born to date, have been "accidents".
The second obvious factor is moving to cities. The proportion of people who live in cities has grown massively over the last 50 years. Cities are fundamentally terrible places to raise kids. They can't play outside, rent is expensive, rent is often the only otpion, with the security of purchase being impossible for most. Pollution is high. Family is often remote. And you're working a demanding job.
So, the simple answer is, when people have the choice to have kids, they only have them in very favorable conditions, and cities are not that.
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u/hananobira 3d ago
Teen pregnancy has also been dropping significantly around the world. A lot of those babies who aren’t being born, aren’t being born to 15-year-olds.
Even in otherwise horribly restrictive and sexist countries, there’s a growing understanding that hey, maybe you shouldn’t marry your 12-year-old off to your 50-year-old business partner. In more egalitarian countries, girls are told to stay in school, go to university, live their lives a little before having babies.
Which is why government efforts aimed at adults aren’t moving the needle as much. If we want another baby boom, we need to toss a lot of our taboos about child marriage and babies having babies. Certain conservative US politicians certainly seem to have decided that’s the path they’ve chosen to set us on…
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u/Dez_Acumen 2d ago edited 2d ago
That’s literally all it is. When given financial, social and bodily autonomy, significant amounts of women will not choose to be broodmares. It doesn’t matter how many subsides or extra help they get. Low birth rates in Nordic countries with the best conditions to support growing the population speak more to how previous generations of women had a sh*t-ton of children they did not want than an actual shift in the wants of women.
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u/xanas263 3d ago
Occams razor says it's just modern contraceptives and womens bodily and economic autonomy.
I fully agree and this is most likely the largest underlying factor.
The second obvious factor is moving to cities
I think this is true for certain cities/countries but not all. There are plenty of cities where children roam free of their parents by around ages 6-7 with enough to keep them busy. In countries like the US where cars are so heavily incentivized and the urban structure is build around them then I agree that it is a likely factor.
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u/SteeveJoobs 3d ago
I want to see a pro-natal policy that grants people more time with their kids. All I’ve seen is throwing money at the problem. But it’s almost like people who romanticize parenthood value lived experience over money.
I’m greedy and I want both low work hours and all my time to myself, so it likely won’t change my mind on DINK. However, I do support anything that lets people choose to be happy parents.
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u/xanas263 3d ago
I want to see a pro-natal policy that grants people more time with their kids.
Scandinavian countries have extensive parental leave for both parents (480 days per child in Sweden), compensation for taking days off for sick children, generally lower working hours and 25+ days of annual leave excluding public holidays. They still have declining birth rates.
I’m greedy and I want both low work hours and all my time to myself,
Ya then you simply are not going to have kids.
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u/SteeveJoobs 3d ago
More and more people that think like me, then. Time for society to think of something other than “pour water into the leaking barrel” to solve problems of depopulation.
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u/puffadda 3d ago
Alternatively, we could work on rearranging our economic systems to accommodate the reality that we live on a finite planet with limited resources instead of bending over backwards to force folks to become parents in pursuit of perpetual growth
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u/novis-eldritch-maxim 3d ago
I hear it is happening even in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it is as if something has finally broken in people
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u/RollingLord 2d ago
More like something got fixed, it’s called giving women rights and autonomy.
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u/spinbutton 3d ago
Do we? Because fewer people on this planet seems like a good thing to me. Maybe we'll be able to have whales and tigers in the future if we don't have so many people.
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u/skippydi34 2d ago
Yeah, I go to work. I come gome 5PM if early. I cook something, maybe sports twice a week. Where does a child fit in my schedule?
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u/civil_politician 2d ago
No one should have kids until you can support a family on a single income again.
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u/seniorfrito 2d ago
When are they going to raise them? If they have kids, what time do they have to raise them into decent functioning adults? The powers of the world are ignoring the fact that they're actively destroying civilization and then questioning why people aren't having kids anymore. More consumers to consume their feculence.
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u/Zingldorf 2d ago
You mean to tell me people don’t have time to have children after commuting 45 minutes working 8 hours then commuting another 45 minutes back? Im shocked!
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u/MasterOfBunnies 2d ago
So their point is, that in our current - nearly global - social climate, with the top 10% having so much vast wealth, and everyone else spending too much time working just to scrape by, that we don't want to add to our misery by creating another living thing that will likely suffer the same misery or worse? Well thank gods they cracked this case wide open!
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u/Altruistic_Ad_0 2d ago
I have known this to be the case since I was a child. Making babies takes time. If having a family interferes with your ability to make money which you need to make a family the money comes first, not the family.
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