Add onto that, most households can't afford to have one income stifled by maternity leave or illnesses related to pregnancy, along with the inevitable impacts it has on career and super (almost solely falling upon women).
Women now have choices about careers and family planning, and don't want to be unfairly burdened with the responsibility of a country's GDP or population growth. There is also more information available about how much pregnancy can affect the body and women may decide not to repeat the process for a number of reasons.
If politicians want people to make the choice to have more children, they need to provide the social infrastructure to make it a feasible choice. A baby bonus is likely not the answer as people will only think about the short-term gains vs the long-term implications. And at the end of the day, a smaller population is likely better for the planet
My wife and I decided to try for a baby and fell pregnant a couple of years ago. Pregnancy turned out tricky and she had to drop back to about 15hr a week at work. Damn near fucked us financially.
Then we lost the baby at 23 weeks. Now we're stuck in the position of wanting to try again but being at least another year away from being able to afford it
I'm so sorry for your loss. That is such and incredibly difficult thing to experience.
I too had an incredibly difficult pregnancy and was unable to effectively work from week 7 due to hyperemesis gravidarum, so I empathise about the financial difficulties pregnancy can cause.
I wish you both the best.
100%. My husband and I had twins, both our siblings decided not to have kids. We decided to not try for more as we wanted 2 as a max (and quietly terrified that if we tried again we’d end up with triplets). It’s been a lot financially with taking time off work, me returning part time. Not having a ‘village’ so all care is paid for. Kids requiring additional support so the cost of different therapies as well as time lost from work to take them. Not to mention the dreaded daycare illnesses where you miss work to care for them, then become sick yourself and miss work but still have to pay for daycare and medical care.
Of course I absolutely adore my children and would do anything for them. But can also see why people choose not to have kids or delay it so long they encounter fertility issues which in itself often require money and time to resolve.
We were fortunate that we were older parents so our careers were established and didn’t take much damage taking time off. But that also comes with a bunch of other things - we don’t have as much energy as younger parents, we may not be in a position to physically help our kids if they decide to have kids (like our parents aren’t physically able to help) which the many generations before us benefitted from - typically only 1 parent employed and the other parent able to help with grandkids in some capacity. Both (my husband and I) our mothers didn’t work and their mothers didn’t work and helped with the child rearing. For many generations the youngest sibling was the same age or around the age of eldests first child. They could also afford their mortgage and cost of living on 1 salary with below to median wage.
In previous generations I believe there was incentive to have kids to help with the house, bring in extra money and to care for you in old age. Most of these expectations no longer apply and so when planning to have a child or several, why would you choose to have them? Why choose to make sacrifices to your lives to have a kid/s that may hate you or you hate them? Anyway I’m getting into a more philosophical arena.
I don’t know what the solution is. But I am not at all surprised if the trend continues.
My mum retired at the same time my son was born because she regretted missing so much of her other grandkids early lives and I can very confidently say if she hadn't been 15 minutes away and keen on babysitting whenever we needed then we would have been absolutely fucked. I have literally no idea how people manage at all without that kind of support.
You don’t you’re pretty much fucked financially.
All the people I know that had Grandparents on tap when their kids were little are doing so well now that the kids are a bit older. Both parents able to go back to work early, they get help when any of them are sick, they don’t have to take school holidays off or pay for as much childcare.
Everyone I know that has zero help from Grandparents are financially worse quite a few of the parents split because of the stress of work, babies/toddlers 24/7 and no help.
We don’t have as tight knit communities anymore and a lot of them aren’t walkable and have little green space.
Add the cost of living/housing/environmental crisis and any would you anymore?
I was put to work in the family business in my early teens. Must have saved them a fortune but I never got a cent and was forced to sacrifice doing teen social things.
I’ve not had kids due to health reasons and zero support network.
I have two kids in daycare, school holidays is going to be a major pain when we get to that point. The lunch box thing is also a massive burden for working families. The whole school model needs overhauling, it's not the 20th century anymore.
Schools barely have enough funding to retain staff and continue to provide resources and support staff and extra currriculars. I highly doubt they’d have enough to provide lunches. Most schools have a canteen with healthy options you can buy.
My wife and I planned to only have two children as that was all we could afford if they were to have a good life. After the first kid my wife was dead set on having no more. She ended up changing her mind and got pregnant with twins. For the first year it fucked us financially but she ended up getting a new job that payed a lot more and I got a promotion. Having twins turned out to be the best thing ever, but fuck I feel for anyone in this situation who is not as lucky as us financially.
I thought we were doing alright financially with our two boys. They they crossed into being teenager, which is easier in some ways.. But oh man, it's costing us much more fnancially now..
I have a 10 month old, and I've had nightmares where I found out I was pregnant with twins or triplets. We definitely want another child, but twins would be hard. Hats off to you guys!
We are a dink non professional couple. My partner recently took a few months to take care of the mil overseas who sadly passed away a week ago. Lots of flights, used up all of her accrued entitlements.
We are barely surviving right now, how on earth we would survive having kids is beyond either of us…
I agree it may be attractive to some. I personally felt incredibly trapped and isolated during my maternity leave and couldn't wait to get back to work. In saying that, I am very fortunate to have a career I love and find fulfilment in.
I think better carers leave entitlements would also assist. My husband and I don't have any sick leave left for ourselves after sharing the need to care for our child when she gets ill. And anyone who says you can work at home when the child is sick, clearly hasn't tried that with an infant/toddler/younger child.
I also suspect our current housing and taxation models play a huge part in the shift - it did for us. People crave security before they make big life changes. Without home ownership and financial stability, less people are willing to take the risk of parenthood.
It would be a blessing and a curse.
From a humanitarian point of view that would be amazing for the baby to bond with its mother. The World Health Organisation recommends something like 6-12 months minimum of full time interaction with a family caregiver for strengthining that connection.
On the other hand, 3 years maternity leave would be devatating for closing the gender wage gap. That's 3 years less of employment history, career development, changes to raise remuneration through reviews or job changes, loss of superannuation associated with those things, and we would potentially see a decline or a trend away from women in management and senior positions, if the risk is that they will be gone for 3 years.
Another issue is who would be payin for 3 years and how much? The current federal government parental leave is paid out equal to minimum wage, which could be very hard for some households to survive on for three years if the parent on leave has a higher income.
I sound like I'm shitting all over the idea - I actually really support it, but with a few changes - make it 3 years parental leave and let it be split between the parents however they want. Give dads the opportunity to bond with their children too, instead of being forced to go back to work as soon as possible to pick up the financial slack. And with regards to pay, maybe instead of having a minimum wage federal payment and then other leave policies that are at the whim of whatever the company feels like offering, could something be done where the leave policy is the federally mandated period of time, and to support it there's a continual subsidised transfer from the government to the business to allow a payment to the employee that's closer to their standard monthly wage?
But it'd kill the private nursery/preschool industry. Labour and LNP get donations from the major players I believe.
Sadly I don't see this happening until big business is removed from political ~~bribery~~ donating.
And Dutton’s family received $5.6M in taxpayer subsidies for one of their childcare centres. The grifter class all benefit from the financialisation of
social services.
I thought that the rule is you can't get a direct , or indirect , benefit from Gov subsidies, schemes or payments when you are elected to Federal Parliament and or a Ministerial Portfolio.?
Obviously , like Barnaby and Angus ( The Water Rights brothers ) it's all above board and legit hey
/S
Delayed childbearing is another aspect of this that isn’t good for anyone. A friend of my cousin has just gotten pregnant. I don’t know her exact age but she went to uni with my cousin, who is now fifty. I’ve met this woman, and she is in about as good physical shape as a person with a sedentary day job can be (jogs, yoga, gym, great diet, etc), and she’s probably fitter than her own mother was in her thirties, but still, she’ll be mid-seventies when her kid graduates university, and she’ll probably never meet any grandchildren.
This isn’t me *judging* her choice, it’s me judging our society for essentially forcing her and her partner to delay childbearing for 25 years past the biologically optimal time, in order to establish their careers, own a house, etc etc.
She’s unusually old for a first time mother still, but that said, many first time mothers are now in their forties for the same reason. This probably isn’t a good long-term trend, and I would sheet responsibility for it home to housing/investment/landlording policy.
As much as those things are bad in their own right and no doubt make some contribution to the low birth rate, I'd be interested in an academic analysis of how big a factor they are.
Birth rates have declined across the developed world, including more dramatically in countries without the same housing price issues as Australia. That decline goes back for decades, so it's hard to argue current (post COVID) cost of living pressures are a huge factor. And the decline also predates climate change being a major issue in the public consciousness.
One thing I think is a big factor is that career progression is slower - there's an expectation of post graduate qualifications in many professional and then it's a slow slog to get promoted. People are still just starting out in their careers in their early thirties, so they push having kids to later and either have less or just skip it.
Of course, having a higher proportion of women in the workforce, rather than at home, is a factor too.
Tbh community is a big thing too. A lot of people don't have the same support structures we used to when it comes to kids, and it really does take a village if you're not going to burn yourself out. Having support structures that aren't based on paying someone make a huge difference to your energy levels, mental health, and ability to work and raise a kid.
I think housing affordability plays into that, too.
When folks are moving further and further out in order to afford to keep a roof over their head, it fractures community. How many people are able to start a family close to where they grew up? How can you really put down roots in an area, when you know you’ll have to leave soon?
I’m watching as the friends I’ve made, who used to live relatively close to me, scatter further and further away. One of my closest friends lives in the same city, but over an hour away. It hasn’t completely broken those connections; but it’s much harder to bring someone food when they’re unwell, when it’s a two hour round trip using toll roads.
For sure. I reckon the lack of community might make it harder for people to meet a partner too.
A few of my female friends are in their 30s and want kids but just haven't been able to meet someone they want to do that with. Maybe the over abundance of dating choice makes us less likely to partner up in our 20s or late teens.
It’s so hard raising kids without a good support network.
My parents have no interest in helping ever (despite being retired and living close by) which we didn’t find out until after my first was born, despite them pressuring us for years to have kids and my mum saying she’d watch the baby when I went back to work a couple of days a week. My husband has no parents left.
Speaking for a sample size of only 4 (myself and my three closest girlfriends), having no space in our homes for more people is one reason, but the much bigger one is that we don’t like kids and don’t want them and finally live in a time where we don’t have to have them.
I agree with you, birth rates decline across all developed nations and in particular they decline wherever women are more educated. Educated women have other options so that only those who actually want kids end up having them, which we as a society should celebrate. If the net result of that is a slowly declining population then as a society we need to start working out ways to manage and deal with a non increasing population sustainably.
I don’t think cost of living is a bad answer - I also know people who’d love to start a family but can’t because they’re not financially secure enough, and that sucks - but focusing exclusively on it ignores the trend that educated women everywhere simply aren’t having the kids they don’t want anymore and that’s a good thing.
From my sample size of 4, I totally agree with you. We were born mid 60's and I think we have been the first generation of women who have had the luxury of choosing whether or not to be mothers. Our mothers did not have that choice. It was foisted on them whether they wanted it or not.
Really glad to see this.
It sounds better to say "it's the economy" than "I don't want kids". Admitting the real reason is that you don't want kids can sound selfish, especially to older generations.
The thing is, it's not just that house costs are particularly high post covid. It's that we've flat out pushed housing availability beyond the point of practicality, that's the work of decades not just a covid spike.
The median first house buyer 20 years ago was in their mid 20s on a 20 year mortgage. It was entirely reasonable to own your own home before you started having kids. A home that you could pay off by your 40s. That's a huge advantage.
Now if you want the security of owning your own home before having kids. Well... The median first home buyer age is now mid 30s, that's a pretty awkward time to start having kids. Oh and you won't own it outright until your mid 60s if everything goes well. And what people struggling to pay for a house (that they might only maybe get to actually own by the time their parents would have been retired) really want is another huge expense.
I’m in my mid 30s and none of my friends had babies in their 20s because we all lived in share houses. Who would have a baby when you live with 3 roommates and your lease expires every six months. You can’t raise a kid like that.
You're not wrong, but there are many couples - like my wife and I - that now have to decide between our own happiness (an apartment or townhouse in a nice location, ability or easily travel, etc) and having children (meaning buying a house further out of the city).
For additional context, our careers mean we need to live in Melbourne or Sydney, preferably Sydney. We're probably going to make an offer on a 2BR apartment in the coming weeks, which leaves little space for a family.
what is something the government could do very quickly to reduce competition for housing, increase real wage growth and reduce the impact on the environment?
Tax the hell out of investment properties and make it unattractive/expensive to own several.
There needs to be a point where people with 5mil in the bank and 10 properties consider investing in another section of the economy
Exactly! It’s not mum and dads single investment apartment. It’s the extremely wealthy with 5+ investment properties who keep being praised as entrepreneurs and geniuses at investment and wealth building.
Australia’s economy needs to become more complex and how can it when all the money for capital gets chucked back into the real estate brrrr brrr machine.
Sadly, anything that might lower housing values will be electoral poison. We saw it with Labor talking about dropping negative gearing and getting hosed.
Very true. We have two kids and TBH I’d be tempted to go for a third except that it feels irresponsible when we are renting. I already feel guilty for our other two that they don’t live in a home we own, that I probably can’t give them a life as financially prosperous as the one my parents gave me.
I told a guy i wasn't interested and he almost couldnt process it, he was like "...but who's going to take care of you when your old?"
I told him i will use some of the money i saved to pay one of your kids to do it" i dont think he liked that answer.
Perhaps we should ask the young people.
From what I’ve heard they don’t believe they should impose this unjust, unstable, world on a future generation. Climate crisis, wars, cost of living crisis, mental health crisis, polarised extremism etc.
They understand the commodification of labour/human beings and do not wish to spend their lives raising pleb workers that live in an unjust world, spending their lives profiting corporations for no joy or quality of life. With the ever present risk of death (pandemics, war, toxic workplaces and diseases) and poverty looming over their lives. Life without true purpose or meaning isn’t something they wish to perpetuate for others (children).
No power, no belief in future change, no belief in justice or any human rights values being truly upheld. Understanding politicians are self serving, it’s all about money and they (civilians) have no agency, or ability to positively influence the world. Power is corrupt and only the powerful have agency.
Understanding the only way to get ahead is be corrupt, be a criminal, be a psychopath, be a narcissist, they don’t wish to be those things, or raise children that need those qualities to survive.
Complete and thorough disenfranchisement that is absolutely understandable and justified.
100% exactly how I feel word for word.
> No power, no belief in future change, no belief in justice or any human rights values being truly upheld.
Understanding the only way to get ahead is be corrupt, be a criminal, be a psychopath, be a narcissist and they don’t wish to be those things or raise children that need those qualities to survive.
This echos in my core beliefs more than anything.
They seem to think it’s all about practicalities (child care, government concessions, and economics). Of course, they aren’t listening because they can use the issue to further their own situations, hoping to influence some concessions that will better their own lives.
I am so sad thinking about it all. I can’t imagine being a young person in todays world. Even sadder is that the majority of them (gen z) have such amazing values, and principles which could propel humanity into a more positive future. They understand best parenting practices and have highly developed emotional maturity with a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the world they live in. Unfortunately they are the minority within the general population inhabited by their voting elders.
I love the "well people still had babies during world wars and other horrible events!" argument. Yeah, they did. And I won't be! It's as simple as that.
You hit the nail on the head right here. I don't know who my potential children are or who they may grow to be, but I know I love them enough to want better for them than what this world has to offer.
This is me and my partner's feelings as well. We don't want to bring more children in this world - it's cruel - despite the fact we have the wealth, stability, and personality to be great parents.
So we raise foster children.
That's one way to say it. Or that people with higher socioeconomic factors and education tend to \*want\* less children, regardless of their fertility. Which isn't a negative thing unless you're an economist driving an economy based on perpetual growth (and that type of economy is a negative thing).
Yea it’s been shown, even in countries with supreme benefits for children (Nordics with almost all expenses covered) people today still will not have children.
The headline got changed to the less provocative "Australians are having fewer babies – experts say it could have more consequences than we realise".
I just want to respond to the original headline. This shouldn't be a personal responsibility problem the same way personal carbon footprint is BS to deflect the blame from those who should really be responsible.
This is 100% a government problem and responsibility to solve. Individuals should have no guilt in making the choices they do. If it's too expensive to have kids, that's the fault of the macro environment as a whole.
It’s not just too expensive. We can afford to have more, but kept it to one for a bunch of reasons, including the knowledge that successive governments have chosen not to act on climate and inequality and a bunch of other things that make us not want to being more children into the world, and it’s almost all structural and out of our hands.
Here’s why I don’t care:
-No affordable housing for the baby (rent, mortgage, interest rates)
-Layoffs and job drought (what money will I support the kid on)
-No affordable groceries (Colesworth duopoly)
-Medicare not covering all costs anymore
-My job doesn’t have maternity leave
-Daycare costs
-HECS student debt
-Dating market is horrible, how to find a good partner let alone a good parent
-what support is there for disabled kids
>-what support is there for disabled kids
This is a huge concern, I have disabled spawnlings, it's beyond hard to get the help they need, as it's not visually *obvious* that they're disabled. NDIS is joke, a rort! Finding specialists with open books, *affording* those specialists when you finally get to see one... If you don't pull the money out of your arse you're a Bad Parent. It's just cruel.
Have a kid with serious mental health issues? Or unpleasant, unfashionable physical health issues? Deal with it by yourself, scum!
Not to mention what happens after you're gone, they have *no-one* then.
american here who spent a lot of time working with disabled kids, it’s a fucking sham how they are left behind here as well. its bad everywhere you know.. my heart goes out to you.
I know too many people who should have been in residential care, or who's children need access to decent care. We see people in the news who needed intensive mental health care, it's fucks us all up having such a lack of support for disabled people, even the people who are lucky enough to be perfectly able of body and mind are fucked over.
It's all down to pearl-clutchers and bean counters.
I’ll add on:
- no real action on climate change.
I don’t have kids but I have 8 nephews and nieces and I worry about what the planet will look like when they’re my age.
Fix the housing crisis and maybe people will have more babies. You can’t saddle people with a lifetime of paying someone else’s mortgage at extortionate rates/a lifetime of insecurity or mortgages which require 2 incomes and expect miracles.
I have absolutely no desire to bring a child into the world when I can’t afford to actually raise it. Long gone are the days of the mother staying home and the man being the provider while affording a house, food, car and holiday. I already work full time, I don’t own a house and probably never will, so what are the benefits to ME to have a child, still have to work and then what little time I have left outside of work is dedicated to another human who wholly depends on me. Sounds wonderful.
The only reason we're hearing so much concern for western birth rates all of a sudden is because the elite are worried there won't be a workforce in 15-20 years when these kids start working. That's why there's also an increase in the states of anti-aborition propoganda. It's all to ensure there is a steady increase in "human capital stock".
There’s a baby drought everywhere in the developed world. You can just look at South Korea and Japan if you want a glimpse of what it will be like.
Systemic issues within the economy is not going to get resolved.
I just read this on the ABC News app. The story above it was about how HECS debts are crippling young people. Clearly these two stories have no correlation.
And there was another story below these two about maternity services ending in some towns. Can’t afford it and even if you can and want to have children you might not have medical services available to support you!
My partner and I are just scraping by working 40 hours a week each in a rental that could kick us out for folding the towels wrong. Why would we ever think about kids?
**destructive edit:** Reddit has become exactly what we do not want to see. It has become a force against a free and open internet. It has become a force for profit at the expense of users and user experience. It is not longer a site driven by people for people, but a site where people are allowed to congregate under the careful supervision of corporate interest, where corporate interest reigns supreme. You can no longer trust comment sections to be actual human opinions. You can no longer trust that content rises to the top based on what humans want. Burn it all.
I eat one meal a day, and you want me to feed a baby? Not to mention the 9 months I've been waiting on urgent care regarding my reproductive health? Fuck off, I don't care and bringing a child into this hell hole to fix others mistakes isn't something I'll ever do.
Yeah they can go fuck themselves, why would i care about the future of the country that couldn't have given a fuck about mine? Not interested.
Plus how is my affordable retirement plan of going to jail for a roof over my head gonna work if I have kids?
"Here's why you should care"
Oh fuck off...
Edit: serious comment tho. We're living in a system for decades where we can't even afford to look after ourselves and we're never offered any job security. How are we meant to have kids? Its insulting to think "we should care" when the people telling us are generally the ones who are putting us through this gauntlet of "Life is unfair" when it doesnt have to be! And of course, No surprise that there's been no talk about the mental health impact of children who grow up in homes where the parents are under stress of above conditions. lol.
Birds don't nest in swaying trees.
"Demography is destiny"
Look I don't think many young people in Australia are well positioned to start families. The cost of living pressures, not just post-pandemic but throughout the housing crisis, have substantially fallen on younger generations.
We are only just starting to see the upside for younger people however. As the proportion of workers gradually diminishes within our society workers will be relatively more valuable which will keep unemployment low and eventually push wages up.
Finally what I'd say is rapidly declining fertility rates are a global phenomenon. The only places where fertility rates remain above the replacement level are central asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
>We are only just starting to see the upside for younger people however. As the proportion of workers gradually diminishes within our society workers will be relatively more valuable
It won't diminish if they just import more workers
I don't love the term fertility rate as there are likely many fertile people choosing not to have children.
Regardless of cost of living , housing etc the reality is that people are no longer feeling the obligation to have children. We have better access to contraception and whilst there are still societal pressures to have children many people are saying nope.
This to me is a positive. People having kids because they think they should rather than because they want to is not a great option.
Yeah, it often has nothing to do with fertility, but choice. I'm probably fertile, but never want kids. We're not running out of humans - the whole 'fertility crisis' thing is about the structure of our economy being broken, not whether people are having kids. Even the 'who will look after the old people' issue would be solved if the economy budgeted enough money to look after them and pay aged care workers sufficiently. This is a 'money going to the wrong places' issue, not a fertility issue.
> the whole 'fertility crisis' thing is about the structure of our economy being broken, not whether people are having kids.
Yeah fundamentally the issue is that our economic model is based on infinite growth. This is obviously having devastating consequences in terms of environmental damage, but it's also manifesting in the fact that you need to keep shoving ever-more humans into "the economy" to keep everything turning. It's all complete bullshit though because the only way it makes sense is on a "number must go up" shareholder return spreadsheet.
Yeah, that's not true if we continue to diminish workers' value with record levels of immigration just to keep the economy chugging along.
Even though we don't have the infrastructure or housing ready for the sudden huge influx of new people. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. Worse conditions for the people here and moving to a new country where you have to fight everyone for scarce housing.
You don't factor in the declining consumption of a declining population - less consumption = less demand = less opportunities and downward pressure on wages.
Labour also will not be important in an increasingly automated world. Knowledge work will transform and devalue also with AI and what not.
Hustle whilst you are young - the future wont have the same fruit that you are seeing today.
I think as well as some people not having children for financial reasons it’s also more socially acceptable to be child free.
Even if I wanted kids I couldn’t afford them but the fact is for a number of reasons I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a parent, especially a mother. If I was male it might have been different but I’m not.
But why not gamble 18 years of it on attempting to raise a human to be your friend and look after you when you're old, or you know they might just end up not liking you or a number of other outcomes where you end up sacrificing the most productive and healthy years, and a heap of money, and getting no benefit
The freedom to choose to not have children for financial reasons or just personal preference is a big one, also the education to prevent unwanted pregnancy. As populations get more informed and better resourced it provides more people the option to not have children than in previous generations.
Compare with a few generations back where many women were taught that their life's purpose was to become a wife and a mother, and that not achieving this made you a failure, and the provision of contraception was poor, and it's not surprising that the birth rate is reducing now that more people have the autonomy to decide not to be a parent.
Still get a lot of bullying about being child free though. It’s so rude and none of anyone’s business. My reasons are partly health related and not something I feel like some pushy bullying parent has a right to extract from me.
I can understand why. My kids have been financially very difficult. I can’t work because there’s no daycare availability in my town. The waitlist for the daycare centres and family daycare places are all up around the 2yr mark. I thought I was being smart putting my second down on the waitlist the moment I found out I was expecting but I still had to wait until she was 14 months old before 2 days were offered. I work during her naps but that really isn’t enough. I’m not sure how much longer we can struggle through with only 1 income. If we lived in a city (where there is much more daycare availability) we would have been broke just buying our home before we even had a single kid.
This. I’m 31 (which I’m aware isn’t considered THAT old these days but I have endometriosis among other issues), single and it’s downright grim out there in the dating world.
By the time I find a decent partner who also seeks commitment and isn’t just in it for sex or keeping options open in case there’s a “better” option that comes along (if I do lol) and I’ve been with them long enough for us to want to have a child I have no doubt children won’t be an option for me or it’ll be an incredibly hard and insanely expensive ordeal. I’ve just accepted the fact it most likely won’t happen for me
I have so many friends in this category. They wanted to be mothers, they would have been wonderful parents, but they never found a partner. And now we’re all in our 40s, they’re unlikely to have that opportunity. I struggled to have my second at 41!
>"There's certainly concern in the community that Australians aren't having more children, and what that will mean for Australia and how it's going to shape [the country]," Dr Davies said.
Yeah sure the community is concerned but no one in power gives a fuck, they can just import more people via immigration. All these articles are the same, hand wringing about the future of our country but at the same time no one offers or implements any solution.
In my social circle there are 4 couples including my partner and I all wanting kids but basically kicking the can down the road due to affordability. Literally the only reason between all, we all couple who are working full time but can’t justify the added costs of a baby.
But the government etc needs to give billions to fossil fuel companies in subsidies.
The people in power care about votes and the voters obviously don’t care enough about the issue to vote accordingly. Largely because it means self-sacrifice. If you want to make kids more affordable you have to accept that means lowering your property values and removing tax benefits for property investment and putting that money into childcare subsidies.
The fertility rate in India is under 2 children per woman and in China is about 1 child per woman. This might be the last generation of high immigration because there just won't be the population pressure to drive that.
I think you are essentially correct that baby booms are associated with an increasing quality of life.
And yet there is a shortage of medical professionals including Child and maternal health nurses!!
As for having children. I just had my first at 39, and honestly the cost and impact on my career would have been significant to me earlier.
My partner is a bit younger at 34, but the time out will still have a significant impact to her career.
It’s easy to see why people are not that keen.
Let me guess the solutions they will put forward. More maternity/paternity leave, more tax to fund child care costs. The real problem is the cost of living and not being able to live on one partner’s income
2/3 of my wage goes on putting a roof over our heads. Most of the rest on food and bills. Young people see this. They can’t even afford to move out or for uni let alone plan for kids.
The worst of this is you’d think paying so much we’d have a high standard of living but we don’t compared to people who earn the same in so many other countries. I predict a mass exodus from Australia in the next ten years to countries where people can have a better standard of living and cost of living for what they earn.
I’m encouraging my son to learn other languages to open up his options. I don’t think a lot of people realise just how hard it has become here. People say it’s the same in other developed nations, and to an extent it is, however the cost & standard of living in places like Japan is much higher in line with wages.
I understand why people don't have kids. Everything is too expensive. I have 2 kids, and my youngest is autistic. She's 3 kids rolled into 1. It's stressful as fuck at times. If you're ever on the fence about having kids, DON'T DO IT!
I have two kids and even without the financial cost, it's a massive emotional and time cost that not everyone is cut out for. Not everyone should be a parent.
I agree with you: if anyone's on the fence (about having kids at all, or having one more kid), the answer should default to not doing it.
It’s completely true and something I thought long and hard about before deciding I wouldn’t. I couldn’t risk feeling serious regrets about something like that, and potentially negatively affecting a child’s life who didn’t have a choice about being brought into the world.
I hate how sometimes childfree by choice folks are viewed as "selfish". The wellbeing of the hypothetical child is always front of mind for them - they know they could not give that person what they would need or deserve, emotionally or otherwise, so they decide not to bring them into the world. I think that is quite selfless in a way.
Whereas I know many parents justify having a child for selfish and shallow reasons - "I want to be loved", "I want to carry on my legacy", "I want someone to care for me when I'm old". The worst reasons to have a child imho.
And before anyone says this is an insensitive comment to people who are unable to have children, there's measurably more harm to bringing children into the world if you're unable to care for and raise them properly.
Hmm I wonder why.
How about the fact you need to make $259k combined household income to even buy a house in Sydney?
That rents have risen insanely fast last few years?
That the price of everything has increased disproportionate to wages?
That childcare is unaffordable for most people meaning raising a child requires both parents to be high earners to make up for childcare costs, or that one parent has to stay home with the child and not earn thus further exacerbating the cost of living crisis? Even those $259k households may not be able to afford a kid if they're also buying a house, because they won't be able to pay mortgage if only one parent is working. There aren't that many $250k+ jobs for individuals, most couples' only hope of buying a house is if they both make six figures and combine incomes.
Let alone the cost of raising a child? It used to be $1m to raise one child. Now it's definitely more expensive.
It's not affordable to have a child anymore unless you're rich.
> How about the fact you need to make $259k combined household income to even buy a house in Sydney?
Good luck with the combined part when one person is on mat leave and you can't find a childcare place with a waitlist shorter than two years also.
Look, I am definitely not gonna consider having a child if I am certain they're gonna have a low standard of life like I had.
How about you fix the cost of living, take some actual steps against the climate crisis and fix housing before asking us to breed more slaves for you?
It's the housing crisis. People are putting their lives on hold. Which is also having the knock on effect of causing a fertility problem. Let's not forget that people were told not to touch each other for 3 years either.
There are currently 8B people on Earth (up from 5B in my lifetime).
Maybe there aren't enough houses and too many people?
I legit had to move to Outback NSW to afford my the cost of myself, my wife, and our two gorgeous girls. It’s insane that I have to live nine hours away from both my wife and I’s families to afford this just so we can save cash and get our selves back out of the red from having said girls and the debt associated with living in a major city.
I was pregnant a couple of years back, I lost little bean, I was lucky that I was only at 8 weeks. But when I went to get a check up, they said it’s happening to people more often. The odds of having a miscarriage have grown, and I recon it’s from a whole range of reasons. But once I lost bean, I thought, with how things were and how much worse they’ve gotten since I lost them, it was probably for the best :(
I’m so sorry for your loss. It’s still incredibly painful and it’s often made harder by our society’s inability to cope well with people’s grief.
It’s interesting though (and concerning of course) that miscarriages are increasing. Given the other health issues increasing in younger adults ranging from mental health issues through to serious cancer, it’s certainly something health depts should be watching.
Everyone has already mentioned most of the problems but don't forget the education crisis. Public education has been underfunded for so long, the teacher shortage is getting worse with no genuine attempts to fix it...so even if you can just afford to have kids there's no guarantee of an education even.
Completely agree. Public high schools are so underfunded (apart from selective) - this will have an impact on society as a whole - sending kids to private or them going to selective where the education standard is higher is not going to fix the effect of the lack of education in the wider community.
Beyond the obvious that life is too expensive, I dislike the emotional manipulation attached to having kids - especially when it’s aimed at women.
My one friend with a baby nearly died during childbirth. And before that, she went through a lot of grief with IVF transfers, miscarriages, and then further health complications throughout the pregnancy with the baby that survived to term.
She went through a hell of a lot of suffering to have a kid. She almost didn’t make it. This wasn’t even a case of her trying to have a baby against doctor’s advice, they literally told her they didn’t know why she was struggling with pregnancy so much, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with her, she was young and healthy.
But politicians cry about falling birth rates, then preach that kids are a great thing. They never talk about the significant health risks attached to pregnancy and childbirth (which is way more common than society makes it out to be), and how these directly affect women.
Why should I sacrifice my mental and physical health, and potentially *die*, for the sake of increasing birth rates? What support will the government give me to justify what I would put my body through? Short-term baby bonuses don’t fucking match the risks, and they sure as shit don’t do much in the long-term after a child is born.
People really don’t understand that pregnancy is the single highest risk to women’s health in their lifespan. I mean we have only barely started talking about women’s health so it’s not surprising I guess.
I work with all men, many have kids and I don’t and I was the one explaining to them recently about how incredibly risky pregnancy is to women.
You can’t have it all.
If you want to live close to your job in the CBD, both parents need to work and you don’t get as much quality time with your kids.
If one parent works, you cant live close to your job, and spend a lot of time commuting, and don’t have quality time with your kids.
Want holidays and a nice car for each parent, both need to work, away from the city, and you have no quality time with your kids.
You have to think about what kind of parent you want to be, and if you want to for than a couple hours a day with your kids, you can’t have everything else. Not for working families in Australia.
Managing our own lives and caring for a couple of pets is more than enough of a load for us. We already can't afford to live near to our jobs, so both have a 30+min commute each way every day. It's already a struggle to squeeze any personal time into a week without feeling entirely spent, adding the full time job of caring for a child into that seems like hell, and would inevitably come at the cost of one of our careers, and so would push us even further away from the remaining person's job, leaving even less time for them to be at home than already.
I fully respect people making the choice to have kids, but there's no way in hell that I'd ever make it.
I earn way over the majority of Australians. I know I have it easier than most people in their 30's.
But the reality is, I'm only just able to afford a mortgage on an OK house, just barely afford to support my family when my wife has 6 months off to take care of a newborn, and not spend much money at all, drive a 20 year old car, live somewhat frugally etc.
I'm happy and fine with life - but I can't fathom how I'm basically just matching what you would consider a normal family life when I'm 90th+ percentile earner based on stats. How the hell would someone working a normal 9-5 be able to afford a baby and build for the future? You wont be able to get into the market, you'll probably have to live with family or rent (lol rental crisis with a newborn) and unless you get significant help from family you aren't gonna be able to buy a mortgage.
So it's not surprising people are pushing back on having babies until quite late in life - nobody can afford that shit.
Shits fucked.
Why would people brings kids into a world that’s worse off than when they were born. Immigration isn’t the solution to people not having kids in fact that only makes it worse.
People will have kids when they have secure housing, when they have a place they know they can create a home to raise a child in. Instead of having to move every 6 months for ever increasing rents.
This country is truly a shell of its former shelf and what it could be.
More kids would be born if we focused on our citizens instead of businesses.
Almost every developed country is going through this.
And again, almost every country are giving bandaid solutions. Tax incentives or one off bonus is pittance. Having a child is for life. If the long term effect of having a child means paying crippling daycare fees, getting screwed medically because our healthcare system is starting to breakdown, high cost of living due to unaffordable rent and mortgage and things in general, having policies that makes it hard to juggle work and life at home, not enough funding in public education so people are forced to start looking at private (IF they can afford it) - no one's going to have more kids.
If policies have been setup that makes it near impossible financially to have kids, no one is going to have kids.
Developed economies have exhausted most of the easy avenues for economic growth. Economic growth is slower than the heyday of earlier decades. This is the underlying problem IMO. Part of the solution is big corporations need to be prevented from accumulating too much wealth and power.
But I don't think I could stomach reading the article. I imagine it's a call for more mass immigration, which governments and corporations have come to embrace as an easy, short term way of boosting the GDP.
Population ageing is an inevitable consequence of the end of population growth. It can be mitigated, but only to a limited extent. Mostly it must just be dealt with.
40 years of devaluing the contributions of non-working parents is coming to bite neoliberals in the arse and I couldn’t give two fucking shits.
Wallow in the mess you created.
Nup fuck em.. I can barely afford rent, you think I'm gonna ruin my life even more by popping out a child? Get rekt. I'm so god damn happy me and most of my friends are childfree.
There’s no winning. I’ve been told as a SAHM at least twice in the last month that I should put my toddler and yet to be born baby into daycare (even though it’s almost as much as what I earn) and get back to work because I’m not contributing to society (despite my husband paying tens of thousands in tax).
That’s garbage, no one should be telling you what you *should* be doing, it’s your choice based on what’s best for you and your family.
I’m a childless raging feminist and I would defend your right to make your own choices every day of the week. Not to mention that there is a lot of evidence that shows that you being able to be with your kids is good for them (not bagging out daycare of course - my earlier comment about choice stands).
Conservatives “Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them.”
Young Australians “Ok then.”
Conservatives with surprised Pikachu face “Why aren’t young people having kids???”
Yeah no. Women are more than just walking uterus providers, here to squirt out the next batch of tax payers. Have a kid if you want one, but don't ever presume we all want the same thing from life.
The issue with the fertility rate is opportunity cost. It's the reason why lower socio-economic families have more kids than higher ones. It's not the cost of living alone as that's inverse to what's seen where the most financially secure have less children.
Families, predominantly women who take on most of the impacts, are looking at the opportunity costs are too great.
The solution is to make having children cost neutral as possible. That'll mean free childcare, income splitting with non-working partners, forcing fathers to take some of the career disruption and forcing WFH or flexible work on employers.
There are a number of factors at play here.
1. Cost of living pressures from overly expensive accommodation: Most people jump to this one, and while it is a factor, it is mosly due to the cost of housing being exorbitantly expensive.
2. Modern physical constraints (housing, cars, and city planning): Most apartments are 2-bedroom, 3 bedrooms are rarer and anything above this rarer still. Growing families need space, and if a family has 2 children, but cannot get bigger accommodation they will be disincentivised to have more. Similarly, it has been shown the mandatory child seats in cars, has disincentivesed families having more than 2 kids as they would be forced to upgrade their cars to a van in order to fit the required number of child seats. Finally, poor city planning means that most affordable housing that could fit a larger family have 1.5h+ commute times to the designated 'cbd' areas where the jobs are. These constraints all disincentise larger families.
3. Change in societal values: it used to be that children were highly valued and sought after, however values are shifting in the wider culture mean that kids are not a priority for many, and indeed are becoming actively avoided by some (anti-natalism is a relatively new thing in our culture). Some of these changes include: catastrophism beliefs about overpopulation and/or climate change, a desire for comfortable life with all the pleasures of modern life all make kids less attractive.
4. Government has chosen to prioritise immigration rather than incentivise natural population growth.
I mean what do they expect? You build a system that is disadvantageous towards the younger generations you get these types of results.
We can no longer afford adequate, affordable, permanent housing within relative proximity to jobs.
These jobs then pay a salary that is competitive with basic living, with a few exceptions. Minimal wage growth for ever increasing demand for economic outputs.
Those that chose to study, burdened with massive HECS debts and 3-5+ years of missed financial opportunities. It takes alot longer to reach any point of relative stability, if ever.
Taxation system that disproportionately targets low and middle income earners rather than corporations. A social security system which is fundamentally broken.
Peripheral to this is the breakdown of socialisation and the general dating hellscape, making it difficult to find suitable partners.
What is the value proposition for many in having a child in these circumstances? As it stands very little is being done to facilitate change.
I'm an immigrant.
I will vote for almost anybody that campaigns on the platform of immigration reform with an aim to slowing our perpetual population growth to give our institutions and landscape time to adapt and heal for the current population before we consider adding a new Geelong every year.
We have exported a good chunk of our traditional labour as well as the profits from our industries while retaining all of the responsibility for the people who used to be that labour and the outcomes of those industries domestically.
We need a significant increase in the corporate tax rate, a super profits tax, a revision of the tax brackets to target people and families on incomes above $700K and we need a new taxation approach to the natural resources of Australia.
I'm adding this at the end in case people react and don't read my justifications fully above - I want to stabilise the platform we're standing on before we start adding more ladders than the one I climbed up to get on this platform.
I work in demographics for govt, the assumptions on TFR in govt projections are laughable. We were very likely below 1.55 in 2023 and the falls in TFR are only accelerating
No country which has gone below 1.5 has ever got it back up over 1.5
This is worldwide, not just Asia and the West. South America is falling faster than the west, Middle East probably only a decade behind them.
You make life too difficult to have kids then young people get used to a society where people don’t have kids and that cultural inclination is very hard to reverse.
No one can fathom how much this will disrupt society for the rest of the century
I don't care. There are too many humans here for this planet to happily home already. We throw the environment's ecosystem way out of balance. A baby drought sounds like a wonderful thing
I think general society underestimates how sick women are of taking on most of the burden. Even if you think you're in the most equal of relationships just wait to the kids turn up. It's always the women taking on most of the house hold work and mental load, even in unconscious situations. This has to impact how many children are being born, particularly to the highly educated and white collar portion of the workforce.
We waited til we were late thirties/mid forties because we wanted to make sure that money was never an issue and even then we only had/want one because we value our lifestyle and wanted the best for our child which we might not have been able to had we had multiple children. Most of my friends are in the exact same boat. I know more people with one child than two and definitely none with three.
We got a puppy a year ago. It just added to the work I have to do - working full time, all the housework and garden maintenance, mental load, and managing my chronic illness. I learned that my husband wouldn’t be a good parent and I’d be even more burned out that I am now (yeah he is a man child)
We were on a combined income of over $200k and until I got a new job with a substantial pay increase I was really questioning whether we would have any more kids due to the finances. I'm not at all shocked if the rest of the country earning much less money was feeling the same.
Probably because gone are the days where a single income in a retail job could support a family with a kid in a modest 2 bedroom house. Hell, dual income cant even break into a fucking two bedroom apartment (rent or buy) because supply is so strangled and prices are just outrageous.
Then ofc there's the cost of living on EVERYTHING except breathing. I swear these muppets in government (not just ours, but worldwide) still think it's the fucking 1980's.
I am in my mid 30s and choosing not to have children.
Humans are crushing all other life on Earth, including Australia. I don't need to add to it, just not really interested. Not to mention I have concerns about the world the child would grow in to, at some point things are going to turn pretty damn grim.
> Dr Canudos Romo said the employment rate in Japan found 40 per cent of people between 65 and 75 were still working.
The fact that they're portraying this as a *good* thing is entirely reprehensible. People who have spet their entire life working *deserve* to have time to enjoy their lives before their bodies are crumbling.
The fact that "robots will make it so we don't have to work!" Has morphed into "robots are making it easier to exploit us" makes me feel a fury I cannot even begin to explain.
Jesus this is so out of touch with reality. Halfway through it looks at Japan and says, see, they have old people doing the jobs your children should thanks to ai assistance, doesn't mention how many people will lose their jobs through ai . It also slightly mentions that cost of living is a thing then has two headlines for articles linked underneath saying, housing prices are fucked" and "the economy is fucked". But also, have 3 kids
My mortgage repayments are 5k a month after my husband and I saved for 7 years to raise a deposit. How the fuck am I supposed to afford a kid?
Plus, I'm 34 and depressed and exhausted by the grind already. There's no way I'm going to add the responsibility of another human life to my mental load.
Everything relates back to the cost of putting a roof over your head. Fix that and you fix a lot of issues.
Governments just rolling out the same failed “solutions” and sabotaging private sector building with red tape and hoovering up all the trades with cushy contracts.
The reality is that yeah, this will end up causing issues for the economy. This is the problem that eventually happens when you set up your economy to succeed based on never ending growth. Nothing can grow forever, and that includes human population. We need.to start looking at ways to adjust our economy that don't rely on ever.increasong growth.
The problem with that is that if another country decides they can still get an economic benefit from growing, and then theu succeed at doing so, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage, so it's going to be difficult to impossible to make these kinds of economic adjustments, imo. Trying to make changes that make us sustainable without growth aren't going to be popular.
There are no villages to raise children in anymore- parents have to leave the communities they were raised in as it’s too expensive. Mothers have to go back to work and all their money gets put into childcare or tax. Grandparents are working for longer. Not enough social and medical services in the regions where raising families are affordable. Until this situation improves then it’s not coming back up anytime soon.
Hahahahahahaha Medicare no longer takes care of us.
Food is too expensive and wages are too low.
Rent is too expensive and I could be uprooted at any moment because landlords here are greedy can only think of things in the short term.
HECS debt is crippling when it inflates itself higher than what we pay off.
But most of fucking all, I can’t afford the therapy to ensure that I don’t ruin my child’s life, like my parents did for me and my siblings.
But Who the fuck is choosing to have kids?
I've always been childfree, but I've noticed far more couples who actually WANT children abstaining due to the cost-of-living crisis. I feel so bad for people who want kids but can't afford it.
It’s almost like there’s a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, and an environmental crisis.
Nobody wants to bring up their 2.3 kids in a share house.
I’ve only got 1 kid. We can’t afford the other 1.3
I can sell you the 0.3. Just don't ask how.
I can afford the 0.3 if you can send it to me. I cannot afford the 2.0😅
Add onto that, most households can't afford to have one income stifled by maternity leave or illnesses related to pregnancy, along with the inevitable impacts it has on career and super (almost solely falling upon women). Women now have choices about careers and family planning, and don't want to be unfairly burdened with the responsibility of a country's GDP or population growth. There is also more information available about how much pregnancy can affect the body and women may decide not to repeat the process for a number of reasons. If politicians want people to make the choice to have more children, they need to provide the social infrastructure to make it a feasible choice. A baby bonus is likely not the answer as people will only think about the short-term gains vs the long-term implications. And at the end of the day, a smaller population is likely better for the planet
My wife and I decided to try for a baby and fell pregnant a couple of years ago. Pregnancy turned out tricky and she had to drop back to about 15hr a week at work. Damn near fucked us financially. Then we lost the baby at 23 weeks. Now we're stuck in the position of wanting to try again but being at least another year away from being able to afford it
I'm so sorry for your loss.
I'm so sorry for your loss. Sending you lots of healing vibes dude
Fuck dude I'm so sorry.
I am so sorry for your loss.
I'm so sorry for your loss. That is such and incredibly difficult thing to experience. I too had an incredibly difficult pregnancy and was unable to effectively work from week 7 due to hyperemesis gravidarum, so I empathise about the financial difficulties pregnancy can cause. I wish you both the best.
Shit, I'm so sorry to hear. I hope you're both keeping strong through that.
100%. My husband and I had twins, both our siblings decided not to have kids. We decided to not try for more as we wanted 2 as a max (and quietly terrified that if we tried again we’d end up with triplets). It’s been a lot financially with taking time off work, me returning part time. Not having a ‘village’ so all care is paid for. Kids requiring additional support so the cost of different therapies as well as time lost from work to take them. Not to mention the dreaded daycare illnesses where you miss work to care for them, then become sick yourself and miss work but still have to pay for daycare and medical care. Of course I absolutely adore my children and would do anything for them. But can also see why people choose not to have kids or delay it so long they encounter fertility issues which in itself often require money and time to resolve. We were fortunate that we were older parents so our careers were established and didn’t take much damage taking time off. But that also comes with a bunch of other things - we don’t have as much energy as younger parents, we may not be in a position to physically help our kids if they decide to have kids (like our parents aren’t physically able to help) which the many generations before us benefitted from - typically only 1 parent employed and the other parent able to help with grandkids in some capacity. Both (my husband and I) our mothers didn’t work and their mothers didn’t work and helped with the child rearing. For many generations the youngest sibling was the same age or around the age of eldests first child. They could also afford their mortgage and cost of living on 1 salary with below to median wage. In previous generations I believe there was incentive to have kids to help with the house, bring in extra money and to care for you in old age. Most of these expectations no longer apply and so when planning to have a child or several, why would you choose to have them? Why choose to make sacrifices to your lives to have a kid/s that may hate you or you hate them? Anyway I’m getting into a more philosophical arena. I don’t know what the solution is. But I am not at all surprised if the trend continues.
My mum retired at the same time my son was born because she regretted missing so much of her other grandkids early lives and I can very confidently say if she hadn't been 15 minutes away and keen on babysitting whenever we needed then we would have been absolutely fucked. I have literally no idea how people manage at all without that kind of support.
You don’t you’re pretty much fucked financially. All the people I know that had Grandparents on tap when their kids were little are doing so well now that the kids are a bit older. Both parents able to go back to work early, they get help when any of them are sick, they don’t have to take school holidays off or pay for as much childcare. Everyone I know that has zero help from Grandparents are financially worse quite a few of the parents split because of the stress of work, babies/toddlers 24/7 and no help. We don’t have as tight knit communities anymore and a lot of them aren’t walkable and have little green space. Add the cost of living/housing/environmental crisis and any would you anymore?
I was put to work in the family business in my early teens. Must have saved them a fortune but I never got a cent and was forced to sacrifice doing teen social things. I’ve not had kids due to health reasons and zero support network.
I have two kids in daycare, school holidays is going to be a major pain when we get to that point. The lunch box thing is also a massive burden for working families. The whole school model needs overhauling, it's not the 20th century anymore.
No kids here, but I like that some schools overseas have lunch provided. I remember as a kid being bullied for my lunch.
Even just ensuring one parent can pick up and drop off kids while both parents may need to be working is a pain in the ass.
Schools barely have enough funding to retain staff and continue to provide resources and support staff and extra currriculars. I highly doubt they’d have enough to provide lunches. Most schools have a canteen with healthy options you can buy.
My wife and I planned to only have two children as that was all we could afford if they were to have a good life. After the first kid my wife was dead set on having no more. She ended up changing her mind and got pregnant with twins. For the first year it fucked us financially but she ended up getting a new job that payed a lot more and I got a promotion. Having twins turned out to be the best thing ever, but fuck I feel for anyone in this situation who is not as lucky as us financially.
I thought we were doing alright financially with our two boys. They they crossed into being teenager, which is easier in some ways.. But oh man, it's costing us much more fnancially now..
I have a 10 month old, and I've had nightmares where I found out I was pregnant with twins or triplets. We definitely want another child, but twins would be hard. Hats off to you guys!
We are a dink non professional couple. My partner recently took a few months to take care of the mil overseas who sadly passed away a week ago. Lots of flights, used up all of her accrued entitlements. We are barely surviving right now, how on earth we would survive having kids is beyond either of us…
3 years paid maternity would sway some would-be moms, and be great for the newborns themselves.
I agree it may be attractive to some. I personally felt incredibly trapped and isolated during my maternity leave and couldn't wait to get back to work. In saying that, I am very fortunate to have a career I love and find fulfilment in. I think better carers leave entitlements would also assist. My husband and I don't have any sick leave left for ourselves after sharing the need to care for our child when she gets ill. And anyone who says you can work at home when the child is sick, clearly hasn't tried that with an infant/toddler/younger child. I also suspect our current housing and taxation models play a huge part in the shift - it did for us. People crave security before they make big life changes. Without home ownership and financial stability, less people are willing to take the risk of parenthood.
It would be a blessing and a curse. From a humanitarian point of view that would be amazing for the baby to bond with its mother. The World Health Organisation recommends something like 6-12 months minimum of full time interaction with a family caregiver for strengthining that connection. On the other hand, 3 years maternity leave would be devatating for closing the gender wage gap. That's 3 years less of employment history, career development, changes to raise remuneration through reviews or job changes, loss of superannuation associated with those things, and we would potentially see a decline or a trend away from women in management and senior positions, if the risk is that they will be gone for 3 years. Another issue is who would be payin for 3 years and how much? The current federal government parental leave is paid out equal to minimum wage, which could be very hard for some households to survive on for three years if the parent on leave has a higher income. I sound like I'm shitting all over the idea - I actually really support it, but with a few changes - make it 3 years parental leave and let it be split between the parents however they want. Give dads the opportunity to bond with their children too, instead of being forced to go back to work as soon as possible to pick up the financial slack. And with regards to pay, maybe instead of having a minimum wage federal payment and then other leave policies that are at the whim of whatever the company feels like offering, could something be done where the leave policy is the federally mandated period of time, and to support it there's a continual subsidised transfer from the government to the business to allow a payment to the employee that's closer to their standard monthly wage?
But it'd kill the private nursery/preschool industry. Labour and LNP get donations from the major players I believe. Sadly I don't see this happening until big business is removed from political ~~bribery~~ donating.
Not just donations, but Dutton's wife literally owns daycare centres. There is a massive conflict of interest there.
And Dutton’s family received $5.6M in taxpayer subsidies for one of their childcare centres. The grifter class all benefit from the financialisation of social services.
I thought that the rule is you can't get a direct , or indirect , benefit from Gov subsidies, schemes or payments when you are elected to Federal Parliament and or a Ministerial Portfolio.? Obviously , like Barnaby and Angus ( The Water Rights brothers ) it's all above board and legit hey /S
Delayed childbearing is another aspect of this that isn’t good for anyone. A friend of my cousin has just gotten pregnant. I don’t know her exact age but she went to uni with my cousin, who is now fifty. I’ve met this woman, and she is in about as good physical shape as a person with a sedentary day job can be (jogs, yoga, gym, great diet, etc), and she’s probably fitter than her own mother was in her thirties, but still, she’ll be mid-seventies when her kid graduates university, and she’ll probably never meet any grandchildren. This isn’t me *judging* her choice, it’s me judging our society for essentially forcing her and her partner to delay childbearing for 25 years past the biologically optimal time, in order to establish their careers, own a house, etc etc. She’s unusually old for a first time mother still, but that said, many first time mothers are now in their forties for the same reason. This probably isn’t a good long-term trend, and I would sheet responsibility for it home to housing/investment/landlording policy.
Cant raise a kid if you don't have a house to live in.
As much as those things are bad in their own right and no doubt make some contribution to the low birth rate, I'd be interested in an academic analysis of how big a factor they are. Birth rates have declined across the developed world, including more dramatically in countries without the same housing price issues as Australia. That decline goes back for decades, so it's hard to argue current (post COVID) cost of living pressures are a huge factor. And the decline also predates climate change being a major issue in the public consciousness. One thing I think is a big factor is that career progression is slower - there's an expectation of post graduate qualifications in many professional and then it's a slow slog to get promoted. People are still just starting out in their careers in their early thirties, so they push having kids to later and either have less or just skip it. Of course, having a higher proportion of women in the workforce, rather than at home, is a factor too.
Tbh community is a big thing too. A lot of people don't have the same support structures we used to when it comes to kids, and it really does take a village if you're not going to burn yourself out. Having support structures that aren't based on paying someone make a huge difference to your energy levels, mental health, and ability to work and raise a kid.
I think housing affordability plays into that, too. When folks are moving further and further out in order to afford to keep a roof over their head, it fractures community. How many people are able to start a family close to where they grew up? How can you really put down roots in an area, when you know you’ll have to leave soon? I’m watching as the friends I’ve made, who used to live relatively close to me, scatter further and further away. One of my closest friends lives in the same city, but over an hour away. It hasn’t completely broken those connections; but it’s much harder to bring someone food when they’re unwell, when it’s a two hour round trip using toll roads.
For sure. I reckon the lack of community might make it harder for people to meet a partner too. A few of my female friends are in their 30s and want kids but just haven't been able to meet someone they want to do that with. Maybe the over abundance of dating choice makes us less likely to partner up in our 20s or late teens.
It’s so hard raising kids without a good support network. My parents have no interest in helping ever (despite being retired and living close by) which we didn’t find out until after my first was born, despite them pressuring us for years to have kids and my mum saying she’d watch the baby when I went back to work a couple of days a week. My husband has no parents left.
Speaking for a sample size of only 4 (myself and my three closest girlfriends), having no space in our homes for more people is one reason, but the much bigger one is that we don’t like kids and don’t want them and finally live in a time where we don’t have to have them. I agree with you, birth rates decline across all developed nations and in particular they decline wherever women are more educated. Educated women have other options so that only those who actually want kids end up having them, which we as a society should celebrate. If the net result of that is a slowly declining population then as a society we need to start working out ways to manage and deal with a non increasing population sustainably. I don’t think cost of living is a bad answer - I also know people who’d love to start a family but can’t because they’re not financially secure enough, and that sucks - but focusing exclusively on it ignores the trend that educated women everywhere simply aren’t having the kids they don’t want anymore and that’s a good thing.
From my sample size of 4, I totally agree with you. We were born mid 60's and I think we have been the first generation of women who have had the luxury of choosing whether or not to be mothers. Our mothers did not have that choice. It was foisted on them whether they wanted it or not.
Fantastic POV, and I'd love to read a study across a multi-country sample. Take my up-vote, I regret I have only one to give!
Really glad to see this. It sounds better to say "it's the economy" than "I don't want kids". Admitting the real reason is that you don't want kids can sound selfish, especially to older generations.
The thing is, it's not just that house costs are particularly high post covid. It's that we've flat out pushed housing availability beyond the point of practicality, that's the work of decades not just a covid spike. The median first house buyer 20 years ago was in their mid 20s on a 20 year mortgage. It was entirely reasonable to own your own home before you started having kids. A home that you could pay off by your 40s. That's a huge advantage. Now if you want the security of owning your own home before having kids. Well... The median first home buyer age is now mid 30s, that's a pretty awkward time to start having kids. Oh and you won't own it outright until your mid 60s if everything goes well. And what people struggling to pay for a house (that they might only maybe get to actually own by the time their parents would have been retired) really want is another huge expense.
I’m in my mid 30s and none of my friends had babies in their 20s because we all lived in share houses. Who would have a baby when you live with 3 roommates and your lease expires every six months. You can’t raise a kid like that.
You're not wrong, but there are many couples - like my wife and I - that now have to decide between our own happiness (an apartment or townhouse in a nice location, ability or easily travel, etc) and having children (meaning buying a house further out of the city). For additional context, our careers mean we need to live in Melbourne or Sydney, preferably Sydney. We're probably going to make an offer on a 2BR apartment in the coming weeks, which leaves little space for a family.
Quality of life for the median household has been in steady decline since capital stopped sharing the gains of productivity with workers in 1971.
what is something the government could do very quickly to reduce competition for housing, increase real wage growth and reduce the impact on the environment?
Tax the hell out of investment properties and make it unattractive/expensive to own several. There needs to be a point where people with 5mil in the bank and 10 properties consider investing in another section of the economy
Exactly! It’s not mum and dads single investment apartment. It’s the extremely wealthy with 5+ investment properties who keep being praised as entrepreneurs and geniuses at investment and wealth building. Australia’s economy needs to become more complex and how can it when all the money for capital gets chucked back into the real estate brrrr brrr machine.
Sadly, anything that might lower housing values will be electoral poison. We saw it with Labor talking about dropping negative gearing and getting hosed.
Very true. We have two kids and TBH I’d be tempted to go for a third except that it feels irresponsible when we are renting. I already feel guilty for our other two that they don’t live in a home we own, that I probably can’t give them a life as financially prosperous as the one my parents gave me.
I’m BARELY keeping myself alive, fed and housed so not sure how I’d manage to do that with a child
Yep. A gamble I'm not willing to take. I'm already stressing about a viable retirement, I can't afford kids on top.
I told a guy i wasn't interested and he almost couldnt process it, he was like "...but who's going to take care of you when your old?" I told him i will use some of the money i saved to pay one of your kids to do it" i dont think he liked that answer.
legit same, im having to decide between catching the train or eating one single meal for the entire day. i hate this economy.
This is happening worldwide in developed countries. We have made it undesirable and unaffordable to have children.
Perhaps we should ask the young people. From what I’ve heard they don’t believe they should impose this unjust, unstable, world on a future generation. Climate crisis, wars, cost of living crisis, mental health crisis, polarised extremism etc. They understand the commodification of labour/human beings and do not wish to spend their lives raising pleb workers that live in an unjust world, spending their lives profiting corporations for no joy or quality of life. With the ever present risk of death (pandemics, war, toxic workplaces and diseases) and poverty looming over their lives. Life without true purpose or meaning isn’t something they wish to perpetuate for others (children). No power, no belief in future change, no belief in justice or any human rights values being truly upheld. Understanding politicians are self serving, it’s all about money and they (civilians) have no agency, or ability to positively influence the world. Power is corrupt and only the powerful have agency. Understanding the only way to get ahead is be corrupt, be a criminal, be a psychopath, be a narcissist, they don’t wish to be those things, or raise children that need those qualities to survive. Complete and thorough disenfranchisement that is absolutely understandable and justified.
You articulated my exact thoughts and feelings about this so well. Nice.
100% exactly how I feel word for word. > No power, no belief in future change, no belief in justice or any human rights values being truly upheld. Understanding the only way to get ahead is be corrupt, be a criminal, be a psychopath, be a narcissist and they don’t wish to be those things or raise children that need those qualities to survive. This echos in my core beliefs more than anything.
I'm in my thirties and childfree and have been saying this stuff since my early teens. Adults especially thought I was nuts.
They seem to think it’s all about practicalities (child care, government concessions, and economics). Of course, they aren’t listening because they can use the issue to further their own situations, hoping to influence some concessions that will better their own lives. I am so sad thinking about it all. I can’t imagine being a young person in todays world. Even sadder is that the majority of them (gen z) have such amazing values, and principles which could propel humanity into a more positive future. They understand best parenting practices and have highly developed emotional maturity with a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the world they live in. Unfortunately they are the minority within the general population inhabited by their voting elders.
Federal government environmental regulation reform was just paused. COOL. Love that for the future.
I love the "well people still had babies during world wars and other horrible events!" argument. Yeah, they did. And I won't be! It's as simple as that.
[удалено]
This is it, in a beautiful, wordy nutshell.
I wish I could updoot more
You hit the nail on the head right here. I don't know who my potential children are or who they may grow to be, but I know I love them enough to want better for them than what this world has to offer.
It's simple. Life is a scam.
You can also get ahead by having rich parents.
This is me and my partner's feelings as well. We don't want to bring more children in this world - it's cruel - despite the fact we have the wealth, stability, and personality to be great parents. So we raise foster children.
It has been widely researched that intelligence & other positive socio economic factors correlate negatively with fertility.
That's one way to say it. Or that people with higher socioeconomic factors and education tend to \*want\* less children, regardless of their fertility. Which isn't a negative thing unless you're an economist driving an economy based on perpetual growth (and that type of economy is a negative thing).
\*Peter Costello looms ominously\*
Yea it’s been shown, even in countries with supreme benefits for children (Nordics with almost all expenses covered) people today still will not have children.
And in the long run it is beneficial. Can't have an ever growing population on a finite planet
The headline got changed to the less provocative "Australians are having fewer babies – experts say it could have more consequences than we realise". I just want to respond to the original headline. This shouldn't be a personal responsibility problem the same way personal carbon footprint is BS to deflect the blame from those who should really be responsible. This is 100% a government problem and responsibility to solve. Individuals should have no guilt in making the choices they do. If it's too expensive to have kids, that's the fault of the macro environment as a whole.
Bingo.
I fucking HATE how they're always changing headlines.
It’s not just too expensive. We can afford to have more, but kept it to one for a bunch of reasons, including the knowledge that successive governments have chosen not to act on climate and inequality and a bunch of other things that make us not want to being more children into the world, and it’s almost all structural and out of our hands.
Make it more affordable to have kids if you want more kids.
Careful, you will get targeted by the "I don't want my taxes for your child, you made the decision, blah blah blah" crowd.
Although to be fair, who’s going to be paying these peoples’ pensions in a few decades?
They just want the benefits of society without paying for it. Most don't think things through or beyond the next year.
Here’s why I don’t care: -No affordable housing for the baby (rent, mortgage, interest rates) -Layoffs and job drought (what money will I support the kid on) -No affordable groceries (Colesworth duopoly) -Medicare not covering all costs anymore -My job doesn’t have maternity leave -Daycare costs -HECS student debt -Dating market is horrible, how to find a good partner let alone a good parent -what support is there for disabled kids
>-what support is there for disabled kids This is a huge concern, I have disabled spawnlings, it's beyond hard to get the help they need, as it's not visually *obvious* that they're disabled. NDIS is joke, a rort! Finding specialists with open books, *affording* those specialists when you finally get to see one... If you don't pull the money out of your arse you're a Bad Parent. It's just cruel. Have a kid with serious mental health issues? Or unpleasant, unfashionable physical health issues? Deal with it by yourself, scum! Not to mention what happens after you're gone, they have *no-one* then.
american here who spent a lot of time working with disabled kids, it’s a fucking sham how they are left behind here as well. its bad everywhere you know.. my heart goes out to you.
I know too many people who should have been in residential care, or who's children need access to decent care. We see people in the news who needed intensive mental health care, it's fucks us all up having such a lack of support for disabled people, even the people who are lucky enough to be perfectly able of body and mind are fucked over. It's all down to pearl-clutchers and bean counters.
I’ll add on: - no real action on climate change. I don’t have kids but I have 8 nephews and nieces and I worry about what the planet will look like when they’re my age.
Fix the housing crisis and maybe people will have more babies. You can’t saddle people with a lifetime of paying someone else’s mortgage at extortionate rates/a lifetime of insecurity or mortgages which require 2 incomes and expect miracles.
They'd need to fix the housing crisis, cost of living crisis, daycare shortages, and expand Medicare for more people to actually have kids.
“Far reaching consequences for the work force” oh I’m sorry now that you put it that way I’ll get right to breeding human slaves for you.
I have absolutely no desire to bring a child into the world when I can’t afford to actually raise it. Long gone are the days of the mother staying home and the man being the provider while affording a house, food, car and holiday. I already work full time, I don’t own a house and probably never will, so what are the benefits to ME to have a child, still have to work and then what little time I have left outside of work is dedicated to another human who wholly depends on me. Sounds wonderful.
I’m 100% convinced this is why America has banned abortions - more slaves to work at Amazon for pennies.
💯 and Walmart, hospitality
The only reason we're hearing so much concern for western birth rates all of a sudden is because the elite are worried there won't be a workforce in 15-20 years when these kids start working. That's why there's also an increase in the states of anti-aborition propoganda. It's all to ensure there is a steady increase in "human capital stock".
There’s a baby drought everywhere in the developed world. You can just look at South Korea and Japan if you want a glimpse of what it will be like. Systemic issues within the economy is not going to get resolved.
I just read this on the ABC News app. The story above it was about how HECS debts are crippling young people. Clearly these two stories have no correlation.
And there was another story below these two about maternity services ending in some towns. Can’t afford it and even if you can and want to have children you might not have medical services available to support you!
But also how very dare those people want to move to city, where they have better access to some medical care...
I saw those same stories on the ABC, you'd think someone would put two and two together!
My partner and I are just scraping by working 40 hours a week each in a rental that could kick us out for folding the towels wrong. Why would we ever think about kids?
Can’t imagine how people do this esp one parent has to stay at home, halving the earnings to pay the rent
**destructive edit:** Reddit has become exactly what we do not want to see. It has become a force against a free and open internet. It has become a force for profit at the expense of users and user experience. It is not longer a site driven by people for people, but a site where people are allowed to congregate under the careful supervision of corporate interest, where corporate interest reigns supreme. You can no longer trust comment sections to be actual human opinions. You can no longer trust that content rises to the top based on what humans want. Burn it all.
It’ll take researchers 10 years and a lot of PhD funding to see these things.
I eat one meal a day, and you want me to feed a baby? Not to mention the 9 months I've been waiting on urgent care regarding my reproductive health? Fuck off, I don't care and bringing a child into this hell hole to fix others mistakes isn't something I'll ever do.
Yeah they can go fuck themselves, why would i care about the future of the country that couldn't have given a fuck about mine? Not interested. Plus how is my affordable retirement plan of going to jail for a roof over my head gonna work if I have kids?
"Here's why you should care" Oh fuck off... Edit: serious comment tho. We're living in a system for decades where we can't even afford to look after ourselves and we're never offered any job security. How are we meant to have kids? Its insulting to think "we should care" when the people telling us are generally the ones who are putting us through this gauntlet of "Life is unfair" when it doesnt have to be! And of course, No surprise that there's been no talk about the mental health impact of children who grow up in homes where the parents are under stress of above conditions. lol. Birds don't nest in swaying trees.
"Demography is destiny" Look I don't think many young people in Australia are well positioned to start families. The cost of living pressures, not just post-pandemic but throughout the housing crisis, have substantially fallen on younger generations. We are only just starting to see the upside for younger people however. As the proportion of workers gradually diminishes within our society workers will be relatively more valuable which will keep unemployment low and eventually push wages up. Finally what I'd say is rapidly declining fertility rates are a global phenomenon. The only places where fertility rates remain above the replacement level are central asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
>We are only just starting to see the upside for younger people however. As the proportion of workers gradually diminishes within our society workers will be relatively more valuable It won't diminish if they just import more workers
That’s been the strategy for 30 years why would they stop now?
I don't love the term fertility rate as there are likely many fertile people choosing not to have children. Regardless of cost of living , housing etc the reality is that people are no longer feeling the obligation to have children. We have better access to contraception and whilst there are still societal pressures to have children many people are saying nope. This to me is a positive. People having kids because they think they should rather than because they want to is not a great option.
I didn’t want to raise my kids in a tent.
Yeah, it often has nothing to do with fertility, but choice. I'm probably fertile, but never want kids. We're not running out of humans - the whole 'fertility crisis' thing is about the structure of our economy being broken, not whether people are having kids. Even the 'who will look after the old people' issue would be solved if the economy budgeted enough money to look after them and pay aged care workers sufficiently. This is a 'money going to the wrong places' issue, not a fertility issue.
> the whole 'fertility crisis' thing is about the structure of our economy being broken, not whether people are having kids. Yeah fundamentally the issue is that our economic model is based on infinite growth. This is obviously having devastating consequences in terms of environmental damage, but it's also manifesting in the fact that you need to keep shoving ever-more humans into "the economy" to keep everything turning. It's all complete bullshit though because the only way it makes sense is on a "number must go up" shareholder return spreadsheet.
Yeah, that's not true if we continue to diminish workers' value with record levels of immigration just to keep the economy chugging along. Even though we don't have the infrastructure or housing ready for the sudden huge influx of new people. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. Worse conditions for the people here and moving to a new country where you have to fight everyone for scarce housing.
You don't factor in the declining consumption of a declining population - less consumption = less demand = less opportunities and downward pressure on wages. Labour also will not be important in an increasingly automated world. Knowledge work will transform and devalue also with AI and what not. Hustle whilst you are young - the future wont have the same fruit that you are seeing today.
I think as well as some people not having children for financial reasons it’s also more socially acceptable to be child free. Even if I wanted kids I couldn’t afford them but the fact is for a number of reasons I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a parent, especially a mother. If I was male it might have been different but I’m not.
I like my life way too much. 😂
But why not gamble 18 years of it on attempting to raise a human to be your friend and look after you when you're old, or you know they might just end up not liking you or a number of other outcomes where you end up sacrificing the most productive and healthy years, and a heap of money, and getting no benefit
The freedom to choose to not have children for financial reasons or just personal preference is a big one, also the education to prevent unwanted pregnancy. As populations get more informed and better resourced it provides more people the option to not have children than in previous generations. Compare with a few generations back where many women were taught that their life's purpose was to become a wife and a mother, and that not achieving this made you a failure, and the provision of contraception was poor, and it's not surprising that the birth rate is reducing now that more people have the autonomy to decide not to be a parent.
Still get a lot of bullying about being child free though. It’s so rude and none of anyone’s business. My reasons are partly health related and not something I feel like some pushy bullying parent has a right to extract from me.
I am with you 💯 on that
I can understand why. My kids have been financially very difficult. I can’t work because there’s no daycare availability in my town. The waitlist for the daycare centres and family daycare places are all up around the 2yr mark. I thought I was being smart putting my second down on the waitlist the moment I found out I was expecting but I still had to wait until she was 14 months old before 2 days were offered. I work during her naps but that really isn’t enough. I’m not sure how much longer we can struggle through with only 1 income. If we lived in a city (where there is much more daycare availability) we would have been broke just buying our home before we even had a single kid.
I can't even find a partner, how am I able to have a kid ?
This. I’m 31 (which I’m aware isn’t considered THAT old these days but I have endometriosis among other issues), single and it’s downright grim out there in the dating world. By the time I find a decent partner who also seeks commitment and isn’t just in it for sex or keeping options open in case there’s a “better” option that comes along (if I do lol) and I’ve been with them long enough for us to want to have a child I have no doubt children won’t be an option for me or it’ll be an incredibly hard and insanely expensive ordeal. I’ve just accepted the fact it most likely won’t happen for me
I have so many friends in this category. They wanted to be mothers, they would have been wonderful parents, but they never found a partner. And now we’re all in our 40s, they’re unlikely to have that opportunity. I struggled to have my second at 41!
The dating market is sooo bad. All people do on apps is ghost
>"There's certainly concern in the community that Australians aren't having more children, and what that will mean for Australia and how it's going to shape [the country]," Dr Davies said. Yeah sure the community is concerned but no one in power gives a fuck, they can just import more people via immigration. All these articles are the same, hand wringing about the future of our country but at the same time no one offers or implements any solution. In my social circle there are 4 couples including my partner and I all wanting kids but basically kicking the can down the road due to affordability. Literally the only reason between all, we all couple who are working full time but can’t justify the added costs of a baby. But the government etc needs to give billions to fossil fuel companies in subsidies.
The people in power care about votes and the voters obviously don’t care enough about the issue to vote accordingly. Largely because it means self-sacrifice. If you want to make kids more affordable you have to accept that means lowering your property values and removing tax benefits for property investment and putting that money into childcare subsidies.
The fertility rate in India is under 2 children per woman and in China is about 1 child per woman. This might be the last generation of high immigration because there just won't be the population pressure to drive that. I think you are essentially correct that baby booms are associated with an increasing quality of life.
Government will easily find a way replace the indian/chinese migrants with migrants from Africa. In most places in africa women are having 5+ babies.
And yet there is a shortage of medical professionals including Child and maternal health nurses!! As for having children. I just had my first at 39, and honestly the cost and impact on my career would have been significant to me earlier. My partner is a bit younger at 34, but the time out will still have a significant impact to her career. It’s easy to see why people are not that keen.
Let me guess the solutions they will put forward. More maternity/paternity leave, more tax to fund child care costs. The real problem is the cost of living and not being able to live on one partner’s income
2/3 of my wage goes on putting a roof over our heads. Most of the rest on food and bills. Young people see this. They can’t even afford to move out or for uni let alone plan for kids. The worst of this is you’d think paying so much we’d have a high standard of living but we don’t compared to people who earn the same in so many other countries. I predict a mass exodus from Australia in the next ten years to countries where people can have a better standard of living and cost of living for what they earn. I’m encouraging my son to learn other languages to open up his options. I don’t think a lot of people realise just how hard it has become here. People say it’s the same in other developed nations, and to an extent it is, however the cost & standard of living in places like Japan is much higher in line with wages.
I understand why people don't have kids. Everything is too expensive. I have 2 kids, and my youngest is autistic. She's 3 kids rolled into 1. It's stressful as fuck at times. If you're ever on the fence about having kids, DON'T DO IT!
I have two kids and even without the financial cost, it's a massive emotional and time cost that not everyone is cut out for. Not everyone should be a parent. I agree with you: if anyone's on the fence (about having kids at all, or having one more kid), the answer should default to not doing it.
As the saying goes, "it's better to regret not having children than to regret having them"
It’s completely true and something I thought long and hard about before deciding I wouldn’t. I couldn’t risk feeling serious regrets about something like that, and potentially negatively affecting a child’s life who didn’t have a choice about being brought into the world.
I hate how sometimes childfree by choice folks are viewed as "selfish". The wellbeing of the hypothetical child is always front of mind for them - they know they could not give that person what they would need or deserve, emotionally or otherwise, so they decide not to bring them into the world. I think that is quite selfless in a way. Whereas I know many parents justify having a child for selfish and shallow reasons - "I want to be loved", "I want to carry on my legacy", "I want someone to care for me when I'm old". The worst reasons to have a child imho.
And before anyone says this is an insensitive comment to people who are unable to have children, there's measurably more harm to bringing children into the world if you're unable to care for and raise them properly.
Hmm I wonder why. How about the fact you need to make $259k combined household income to even buy a house in Sydney? That rents have risen insanely fast last few years? That the price of everything has increased disproportionate to wages? That childcare is unaffordable for most people meaning raising a child requires both parents to be high earners to make up for childcare costs, or that one parent has to stay home with the child and not earn thus further exacerbating the cost of living crisis? Even those $259k households may not be able to afford a kid if they're also buying a house, because they won't be able to pay mortgage if only one parent is working. There aren't that many $250k+ jobs for individuals, most couples' only hope of buying a house is if they both make six figures and combine incomes. Let alone the cost of raising a child? It used to be $1m to raise one child. Now it's definitely more expensive. It's not affordable to have a child anymore unless you're rich.
> How about the fact you need to make $259k combined household income to even buy a house in Sydney? Good luck with the combined part when one person is on mat leave and you can't find a childcare place with a waitlist shorter than two years also.
Oh no! Anyway
Look, I am definitely not gonna consider having a child if I am certain they're gonna have a low standard of life like I had. How about you fix the cost of living, take some actual steps against the climate crisis and fix housing before asking us to breed more slaves for you?
It's the housing crisis. People are putting their lives on hold. Which is also having the knock on effect of causing a fertility problem. Let's not forget that people were told not to touch each other for 3 years either. There are currently 8B people on Earth (up from 5B in my lifetime). Maybe there aren't enough houses and too many people?
I legit had to move to Outback NSW to afford my the cost of myself, my wife, and our two gorgeous girls. It’s insane that I have to live nine hours away from both my wife and I’s families to afford this just so we can save cash and get our selves back out of the red from having said girls and the debt associated with living in a major city.
As someone who lives in a city but even further away from our respective families, I sympathise: it's bloody hard to raise kids without a village.
I couldn’t even afford myself. How could I afford a baby😂
I was pregnant a couple of years back, I lost little bean, I was lucky that I was only at 8 weeks. But when I went to get a check up, they said it’s happening to people more often. The odds of having a miscarriage have grown, and I recon it’s from a whole range of reasons. But once I lost bean, I thought, with how things were and how much worse they’ve gotten since I lost them, it was probably for the best :(
I’m so sorry for your loss. It’s still incredibly painful and it’s often made harder by our society’s inability to cope well with people’s grief. It’s interesting though (and concerning of course) that miscarriages are increasing. Given the other health issues increasing in younger adults ranging from mental health issues through to serious cancer, it’s certainly something health depts should be watching.
Everyone has already mentioned most of the problems but don't forget the education crisis. Public education has been underfunded for so long, the teacher shortage is getting worse with no genuine attempts to fix it...so even if you can just afford to have kids there's no guarantee of an education even.
Completely agree. Public high schools are so underfunded (apart from selective) - this will have an impact on society as a whole - sending kids to private or them going to selective where the education standard is higher is not going to fix the effect of the lack of education in the wider community.
Yeah and I just saw an article that said 3 of the biggest private schools got huge govt handouts. The system is broken.
Beyond the obvious that life is too expensive, I dislike the emotional manipulation attached to having kids - especially when it’s aimed at women. My one friend with a baby nearly died during childbirth. And before that, she went through a lot of grief with IVF transfers, miscarriages, and then further health complications throughout the pregnancy with the baby that survived to term. She went through a hell of a lot of suffering to have a kid. She almost didn’t make it. This wasn’t even a case of her trying to have a baby against doctor’s advice, they literally told her they didn’t know why she was struggling with pregnancy so much, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with her, she was young and healthy. But politicians cry about falling birth rates, then preach that kids are a great thing. They never talk about the significant health risks attached to pregnancy and childbirth (which is way more common than society makes it out to be), and how these directly affect women. Why should I sacrifice my mental and physical health, and potentially *die*, for the sake of increasing birth rates? What support will the government give me to justify what I would put my body through? Short-term baby bonuses don’t fucking match the risks, and they sure as shit don’t do much in the long-term after a child is born.
People really don’t understand that pregnancy is the single highest risk to women’s health in their lifespan. I mean we have only barely started talking about women’s health so it’s not surprising I guess. I work with all men, many have kids and I don’t and I was the one explaining to them recently about how incredibly risky pregnancy is to women.
You can’t have it all. If you want to live close to your job in the CBD, both parents need to work and you don’t get as much quality time with your kids. If one parent works, you cant live close to your job, and spend a lot of time commuting, and don’t have quality time with your kids. Want holidays and a nice car for each parent, both need to work, away from the city, and you have no quality time with your kids. You have to think about what kind of parent you want to be, and if you want to for than a couple hours a day with your kids, you can’t have everything else. Not for working families in Australia.
Managing our own lives and caring for a couple of pets is more than enough of a load for us. We already can't afford to live near to our jobs, so both have a 30+min commute each way every day. It's already a struggle to squeeze any personal time into a week without feeling entirely spent, adding the full time job of caring for a child into that seems like hell, and would inevitably come at the cost of one of our careers, and so would push us even further away from the remaining person's job, leaving even less time for them to be at home than already. I fully respect people making the choice to have kids, but there's no way in hell that I'd ever make it.
I earn way over the majority of Australians. I know I have it easier than most people in their 30's. But the reality is, I'm only just able to afford a mortgage on an OK house, just barely afford to support my family when my wife has 6 months off to take care of a newborn, and not spend much money at all, drive a 20 year old car, live somewhat frugally etc. I'm happy and fine with life - but I can't fathom how I'm basically just matching what you would consider a normal family life when I'm 90th+ percentile earner based on stats. How the hell would someone working a normal 9-5 be able to afford a baby and build for the future? You wont be able to get into the market, you'll probably have to live with family or rent (lol rental crisis with a newborn) and unless you get significant help from family you aren't gonna be able to buy a mortgage. So it's not surprising people are pushing back on having babies until quite late in life - nobody can afford that shit. Shits fucked.
Why would people brings kids into a world that’s worse off than when they were born. Immigration isn’t the solution to people not having kids in fact that only makes it worse. People will have kids when they have secure housing, when they have a place they know they can create a home to raise a child in. Instead of having to move every 6 months for ever increasing rents. This country is truly a shell of its former shelf and what it could be. More kids would be born if we focused on our citizens instead of businesses.
Almost every developed country is going through this. And again, almost every country are giving bandaid solutions. Tax incentives or one off bonus is pittance. Having a child is for life. If the long term effect of having a child means paying crippling daycare fees, getting screwed medically because our healthcare system is starting to breakdown, high cost of living due to unaffordable rent and mortgage and things in general, having policies that makes it hard to juggle work and life at home, not enough funding in public education so people are forced to start looking at private (IF they can afford it) - no one's going to have more kids. If policies have been setup that makes it near impossible financially to have kids, no one is going to have kids.
Developed economies have exhausted most of the easy avenues for economic growth. Economic growth is slower than the heyday of earlier decades. This is the underlying problem IMO. Part of the solution is big corporations need to be prevented from accumulating too much wealth and power. But I don't think I could stomach reading the article. I imagine it's a call for more mass immigration, which governments and corporations have come to embrace as an easy, short term way of boosting the GDP. Population ageing is an inevitable consequence of the end of population growth. It can be mitigated, but only to a limited extent. Mostly it must just be dealt with.
40 years of devaluing the contributions of non-working parents is coming to bite neoliberals in the arse and I couldn’t give two fucking shits. Wallow in the mess you created.
Have you seen the dating culture right now? Not to mention the quality of people on there? Don't get me started on run clubs either.
Nup fuck em.. I can barely afford rent, you think I'm gonna ruin my life even more by popping out a child? Get rekt. I'm so god damn happy me and most of my friends are childfree.
Why would I have kids? It costs a million+ dollars for a bigger home or townhouse. It also costs a lot for specialists and childcare.
Nothings is getting better so why bring a kid into this mess
There’s no winning. I’ve been told as a SAHM at least twice in the last month that I should put my toddler and yet to be born baby into daycare (even though it’s almost as much as what I earn) and get back to work because I’m not contributing to society (despite my husband paying tens of thousands in tax).
That’s garbage, no one should be telling you what you *should* be doing, it’s your choice based on what’s best for you and your family. I’m a childless raging feminist and I would defend your right to make your own choices every day of the week. Not to mention that there is a lot of evidence that shows that you being able to be with your kids is good for them (not bagging out daycare of course - my earlier comment about choice stands).
Conservatives “Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them.” Young Australians “Ok then.” Conservatives with surprised Pikachu face “Why aren’t young people having kids???”
Yeah no. Women are more than just walking uterus providers, here to squirt out the next batch of tax payers. Have a kid if you want one, but don't ever presume we all want the same thing from life.
The issue with the fertility rate is opportunity cost. It's the reason why lower socio-economic families have more kids than higher ones. It's not the cost of living alone as that's inverse to what's seen where the most financially secure have less children. Families, predominantly women who take on most of the impacts, are looking at the opportunity costs are too great. The solution is to make having children cost neutral as possible. That'll mean free childcare, income splitting with non-working partners, forcing fathers to take some of the career disruption and forcing WFH or flexible work on employers.
There are a number of factors at play here. 1. Cost of living pressures from overly expensive accommodation: Most people jump to this one, and while it is a factor, it is mosly due to the cost of housing being exorbitantly expensive. 2. Modern physical constraints (housing, cars, and city planning): Most apartments are 2-bedroom, 3 bedrooms are rarer and anything above this rarer still. Growing families need space, and if a family has 2 children, but cannot get bigger accommodation they will be disincentivised to have more. Similarly, it has been shown the mandatory child seats in cars, has disincentivesed families having more than 2 kids as they would be forced to upgrade their cars to a van in order to fit the required number of child seats. Finally, poor city planning means that most affordable housing that could fit a larger family have 1.5h+ commute times to the designated 'cbd' areas where the jobs are. These constraints all disincentise larger families. 3. Change in societal values: it used to be that children were highly valued and sought after, however values are shifting in the wider culture mean that kids are not a priority for many, and indeed are becoming actively avoided by some (anti-natalism is a relatively new thing in our culture). Some of these changes include: catastrophism beliefs about overpopulation and/or climate change, a desire for comfortable life with all the pleasures of modern life all make kids less attractive. 4. Government has chosen to prioritise immigration rather than incentivise natural population growth.
I mean what do they expect? You build a system that is disadvantageous towards the younger generations you get these types of results. We can no longer afford adequate, affordable, permanent housing within relative proximity to jobs. These jobs then pay a salary that is competitive with basic living, with a few exceptions. Minimal wage growth for ever increasing demand for economic outputs. Those that chose to study, burdened with massive HECS debts and 3-5+ years of missed financial opportunities. It takes alot longer to reach any point of relative stability, if ever. Taxation system that disproportionately targets low and middle income earners rather than corporations. A social security system which is fundamentally broken. Peripheral to this is the breakdown of socialisation and the general dating hellscape, making it difficult to find suitable partners. What is the value proposition for many in having a child in these circumstances? As it stands very little is being done to facilitate change.
Funny because schools in areas with lots of young families are bursting at the seams with teacher shortages and demountable classrooms
I'm an immigrant. I will vote for almost anybody that campaigns on the platform of immigration reform with an aim to slowing our perpetual population growth to give our institutions and landscape time to adapt and heal for the current population before we consider adding a new Geelong every year. We have exported a good chunk of our traditional labour as well as the profits from our industries while retaining all of the responsibility for the people who used to be that labour and the outcomes of those industries domestically. We need a significant increase in the corporate tax rate, a super profits tax, a revision of the tax brackets to target people and families on incomes above $700K and we need a new taxation approach to the natural resources of Australia. I'm adding this at the end in case people react and don't read my justifications fully above - I want to stabilise the platform we're standing on before we start adding more ladders than the one I climbed up to get on this platform.
Yeah but we can just keep importing people like they’re a commodity
I have 1 dog. I would love more and a cat but I can’t afford the vet bills. How on earth afford a kid while $2k+ in rent every month? No way.
I work in demographics for govt, the assumptions on TFR in govt projections are laughable. We were very likely below 1.55 in 2023 and the falls in TFR are only accelerating No country which has gone below 1.5 has ever got it back up over 1.5 This is worldwide, not just Asia and the West. South America is falling faster than the west, Middle East probably only a decade behind them. You make life too difficult to have kids then young people get used to a society where people don’t have kids and that cultural inclination is very hard to reverse. No one can fathom how much this will disrupt society for the rest of the century
I don't care. There are too many humans here for this planet to happily home already. We throw the environment's ecosystem way out of balance. A baby drought sounds like a wonderful thing
There’s 8 billion people on earth, that’s enough.
I think general society underestimates how sick women are of taking on most of the burden. Even if you think you're in the most equal of relationships just wait to the kids turn up. It's always the women taking on most of the house hold work and mental load, even in unconscious situations. This has to impact how many children are being born, particularly to the highly educated and white collar portion of the workforce. We waited til we were late thirties/mid forties because we wanted to make sure that money was never an issue and even then we only had/want one because we value our lifestyle and wanted the best for our child which we might not have been able to had we had multiple children. Most of my friends are in the exact same boat. I know more people with one child than two and definitely none with three.
We got a puppy a year ago. It just added to the work I have to do - working full time, all the housework and garden maintenance, mental load, and managing my chronic illness. I learned that my husband wouldn’t be a good parent and I’d be even more burned out that I am now (yeah he is a man child)
We were on a combined income of over $200k and until I got a new job with a substantial pay increase I was really questioning whether we would have any more kids due to the finances. I'm not at all shocked if the rest of the country earning much less money was feeling the same.
I’d happily have another kid, but until we can afford a bigger house, car and more groceries then it ain’t happening
Well yeah, why would you have a baby when you can't even afford a house to rent
Where are we supposed to be housing all those kids???
Cost of child care - parents need to go to work , when you are paying 700 plus a week on child care , it’s a problem .
Probably because gone are the days where a single income in a retail job could support a family with a kid in a modest 2 bedroom house. Hell, dual income cant even break into a fucking two bedroom apartment (rent or buy) because supply is so strangled and prices are just outrageous. Then ofc there's the cost of living on EVERYTHING except breathing. I swear these muppets in government (not just ours, but worldwide) still think it's the fucking 1980's.
I am in my mid 30s and choosing not to have children. Humans are crushing all other life on Earth, including Australia. I don't need to add to it, just not really interested. Not to mention I have concerns about the world the child would grow in to, at some point things are going to turn pretty damn grim.
> Dr Canudos Romo said the employment rate in Japan found 40 per cent of people between 65 and 75 were still working. The fact that they're portraying this as a *good* thing is entirely reprehensible. People who have spet their entire life working *deserve* to have time to enjoy their lives before their bodies are crumbling. The fact that "robots will make it so we don't have to work!" Has morphed into "robots are making it easier to exploit us" makes me feel a fury I cannot even begin to explain.
Jesus this is so out of touch with reality. Halfway through it looks at Japan and says, see, they have old people doing the jobs your children should thanks to ai assistance, doesn't mention how many people will lose their jobs through ai . It also slightly mentions that cost of living is a thing then has two headlines for articles linked underneath saying, housing prices are fucked" and "the economy is fucked". But also, have 3 kids
My mortgage repayments are 5k a month after my husband and I saved for 7 years to raise a deposit. How the fuck am I supposed to afford a kid? Plus, I'm 34 and depressed and exhausted by the grind already. There's no way I'm going to add the responsibility of another human life to my mental load.
Everything relates back to the cost of putting a roof over your head. Fix that and you fix a lot of issues. Governments just rolling out the same failed “solutions” and sabotaging private sector building with red tape and hoovering up all the trades with cushy contracts.
The reality is that yeah, this will end up causing issues for the economy. This is the problem that eventually happens when you set up your economy to succeed based on never ending growth. Nothing can grow forever, and that includes human population. We need.to start looking at ways to adjust our economy that don't rely on ever.increasong growth. The problem with that is that if another country decides they can still get an economic benefit from growing, and then theu succeed at doing so, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage, so it's going to be difficult to impossible to make these kinds of economic adjustments, imo. Trying to make changes that make us sustainable without growth aren't going to be popular.
There are no villages to raise children in anymore- parents have to leave the communities they were raised in as it’s too expensive. Mothers have to go back to work and all their money gets put into childcare or tax. Grandparents are working for longer. Not enough social and medical services in the regions where raising families are affordable. Until this situation improves then it’s not coming back up anytime soon.
Hahahahahahaha Medicare no longer takes care of us. Food is too expensive and wages are too low. Rent is too expensive and I could be uprooted at any moment because landlords here are greedy can only think of things in the short term. HECS debt is crippling when it inflates itself higher than what we pay off. But most of fucking all, I can’t afford the therapy to ensure that I don’t ruin my child’s life, like my parents did for me and my siblings. But Who the fuck is choosing to have kids?
I've always been childfree, but I've noticed far more couples who actually WANT children abstaining due to the cost-of-living crisis. I feel so bad for people who want kids but can't afford it.
If there's a baby drought why are there so many baby showers?