> And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. ... The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason.
I mean, putting aside the other good comments this has received, why are the kids not ready? Because if I look around at myself and my peers, I see a lot of people who absolutely want kids but feel they can't have them, for a number of reasons, but not unimportant reasons:
- A lot of people are delaying because they don't feel financially stable enough, because of the increasing costs of lifes essentials, not the least of which is housing, and/or student loan debt which was foisted on them by the selfish decisions of the aforementioned grandparents.
- Tons of people are avoiding kids because they don't want to bring them into a world as unstable as ours, that instability expressed as some combination of: our ever worsening biosphere and the long-term threats of climate change, the aforementioned everything-getting-more-expensive-all-the-time while wages continue stagnating, the political instability with micro-wars playing out all over the place, the economic precarity as our system continues enabling bad actors, the social instability caused by deepening political divides and extremisms literally everywhere over what would otherwise be such benign things, and for flavor, a few things that absolutely deserve extremist responses...
Like, one of the first things that goes away when an animal population is stressed on a macro-scale is reproduction. It seems to me if we want to promote reproduction again, we need to make our world less... awful? Like by and large, my life is great, but I'm child-free and that decision was informed partly by the fact that I have to meter my intake of global news lest I become so depressed I can't function, and aside of that, I started making six figures 2 years ago which is legitimately a thing I never thought would happen, and yet in those subsequent 2 years I have never felt poorer because every last thing costs more now than it ever has, even asking my mother.
I think it's impossible to divorce a discussion like this from the fact that there are absolutely pages upon pages of good, rational, logical reasons one can write to not have children and commensurate with that fact, we see birth rates plummeting all over the place.