Some disincentives to have kids, if you grew up in the 21st century:
- The cost (financial, time, stress/health) is incredibly high. When cost of living as one person increases somewhere between notably and substantially faster than wages, it’s hard to justify paying for another person while likely also taking an income cut. You end up with entire classes of people whose careers will struggle to pay for their own life, let alone that of a kid. This is playing out in real time - I personally know people who commute 30-45 minutes by car to make $23/hour (in Canada, in a moderately high CoL city - that’s $16USD). When I was in university, some of my classmates who worked at the Starbucks near campus had coworkers (there were at least two instances of this that I know of) in their 40s with kids who commuted over an hour to make however much money Starbucks managers make, and one had a second job on weekends. It’s not hard to look at that and think, “how is that something you’d want to do to yourself?”
- The feeling (perceived or real) that the world is becoming a worse place. 24 hour news and social media don’t help, with either the perception or the actual situation. Why would I want to raise a kid who could be a victim of one of the weekly school shootings? Or who’s going to be left dealing with an even harder life financially/etc? Or who’s going to resent older generations for selfishly wasting the earth’s resources?
It’s generally quite easy when you work in tech with a partner who works in tech to just assume that having kids is an easy choice (I work with people who are like that, who apparently only see the world through rose-tinted glasses, and are shocked someone could even possibly not want to pop out as many babies as possible). But when you look at the level of struggle a significant portion of the population endures, as they become generally more educated and more capable of critical thinking over time, it’s pretty clear why large swaths of people will start thinking “maybe we shouldn’t have kids just for the sake of having kids, especially if we don’t actually want to.”
That’s ignoring of course the general overpopulation and lack of sustainability of the western lifestyle (and the associated impact of having a kid on climate change - pretty much the single worst thing you could do, if you can about that at all). People who are tuned in to those sorts of issues are also more likely to not want kids, either because they don’t want to contribute to the problem, or raise kids who will have to deal with the fallout.
If you’re driven crazy by people having a different viewpoint from your own, you may want to consider reflecting on why you are so deeply entrenched in your beliefs. It is rarely productive.