Why does today's youth not want to have kids?
Typing out that title really made me feel like a boomer but my question is genuine
I want to firstly list out the arguments I hear for this
- Why bring a child into this world they will have to suffer
- It is very expensive to have a child and house prices are very high
- I just don't want to have children because I want to live my life without that responsibility
- Overpopulation
Now I will present my views on each of those popular arguments
Bringing a baby into the world today would be factually a better time to do so than any time ever in human history. There are so many facilities, services and opportunities readily available that people from the start of humankind to 20 years ago didn't have access to. And yes everyone has struggles and so will your child but struggling is an essential part of life without which the experience of life is incomplete I don't understand why people want to avoid struggles rather than facing them.
Yes it is expensive to have a child... but it is the easiest it has ever been...? Like yeah it is expensive compared to buying groceries and all but like think on a larger scale. Your parents had to put in even more efforts than you have to. Your stone age ancestor conceived naked on mud and stone. Your great grandparent conceived without any medical help. You are living a better life than the most of mankind and your child will live a better life than yours.
And for the third point I don't even know what to say. You are selfish I guess? Because reproduction is one of the fundamentals of life. Every species does it and the ones who don't, go extinct. It is engrained in our DNA. I can't comprehend how one can treat having a child as 'unwanted responsibility'. I would be heartbroken if my parents felt that but fortunately they don't.
Yes the world is overpopulated with humans. But that is because, people used to have many many kids and many of them died as an infant. But recently (recent relative to history) the wide availability of medical facilities helped decrease infant mortality, because of which there was a surge in population. Now even if you have 2 kids you actually are maintaining the replacement rate which means you are not contributing to overpopulation. In developed countries like the ones is Europe have birth rate of around 1.2 per woman which is drastically low if they keep this up their ethnicity might go extinct. The world is currently overpopulated but ~50 years from now when the generation from population surge will die you will see a drastic decline in population.