I see the opinion that having children is a bad idea espoused a lot in this sub, and it's unfortunate that, as someone who actually wants kids one day, I have to agree. For most of us, having kids right now would be putting us on a one-way track downwards.
There are a lot of factors contributing to this now-widespread choice:
– Standards. There are so many standards that myself and others would have to meet before we would even consider having kids. We don't want to have kids that had to settle for our shitty public school system like I had to just because I can't afford a better school for them. I don't want them to have to work and pay their own way through college. I don't want them to get through the first twenty years of their life only to enter a decades-long grind just so they can afford necessities and a basic home. I would want to be a success myself just to even consider having kids of my own, so they could avoid the struggle entirely. This is hardly a rare opinion among the younger generation.
– Reactions to climate change. Many people want to have less kids, since having a kid is the biggest contribution you can make to the Earth's slow destruction. Even the “pro-kids” groups I've met aren't planning to have more than one to two kids.
– Population density. We live in such closely packed communities with so few successful job opportunities, that many of us are having a “nah, we have enough people” reaction. After all, why have four kids when you can only provide one kid with their own bedroom?
– Selfishness. People want more time to themselves. However, I believe this opinion is often blown out of proportion for how much impact it actually has versus the other reasons in this list. It's almost used maliciously when brought up as a way to silence valid concerns and to paint younger generations as just being too stuck-up to want kids. It's a valid point, but it's always used too broadly.
You would think that with all the factors that are pushing for a population decline that we would be seeing large population drops in the most educated countries. While it's true that native populations are seeing drops, most countries are still experiencing aggregate growth. The reality is that we're seeing counter-measures taken by capitalist government and management to subvert the people's reaction to falling quality of life standards through immigration. There's no space in our political realm for the notion that we SHOULD be seeing a population decline because it's the intelligent reaction to social, economic, and resource-deficient pressures. That a population drop would mean employers need to be more competitive with their offers. We're in a societal race to the bottom, towards a future where middle-class does not exist and the ultra-poor who will continue to have kids are continuously used as a tool of oppression.
Our governments continue to paint population decline as the end of the world so they can justify allowing in more foreign workers to dilute worker's rights and deflate wages. To preface, this is not meant to be discriminatory to any specific group, only population growth. My country lets in hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have no qualms about having a family of five on two Subway worker's salaries because their perception of “quality of life” for children is twenty steps below ours. Grocery stores are considered a luxury, detached family homes are considered a luxury…everything that makes up the basis of the Western-view of a good life is considered a gross luxury by many of the people we're admitting into our countries. It doesn't help that most of them come from cultural and religious backgrounds where kids are just a thing you're still expected to have, regardless of finances. The worst part is that these are the groups being taken advantage of the most by the current system, the people who are out of tune to any notion of the current struggle for better conditions because even our falling standards are still better for them than life in their home countries.
I want to have kids. I really do. However, like many others in this sub, I can hardly imagine bringing a child into a world that's worse off than when I first found it. It's a sign of the times that no one with a lick of sense is looking at having kids today.