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So this is interestin'... Births are lower than they've been since the late 1970s


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Posted

For reasons unrelated to anything, I was in a discussion today and learned that locally, preschools are struggling to get full enrollment. Which reminded me that I'm Gen X and that this can be a problem if kids aren't born. So I looked it up.

image.thumb.png.3883205a19de1b9260e0868a8ce612c5.png

Kids aren't being born.

It's not as bad as that extreme low point, the nadir of Gen X when Nicole and I managed to scream our way out of our mothers' guts, but it's low.Note that this is the absolute number of births, not even the birth rate. Which is as you'd expect.

Spoiler

 

 

image.thumb.png.8f4a3e09242b7ea9f733bf129bfe5cb8.png

 

The rate is abysmal, as you'd expect.

Anyway. Pretty dang interesting to me that the actual number of births is so low. This will have some pretty severe economic implications a quarter of a century from now.

But we're already seeing it affect preschools.

Posted (edited)

Our grandkids are 3 and 1.  There's absolutely still waiting lists for quality daycare and preschools.  It's expensive AF and the 2nd kid makes the equation increasingly difficult to justify both parents working full time when it comes to the intersection of diminishing returns financially and investing that extra time directly into the kids..

Both of their parents are post grad educated, gainfully employed, pay their taxes, never been arrested etc.  I'm sure that's somehow undesirable for some of your assessments on here.  All is not lost, our other son and DIL are equally educated but 5 years younger and insist they are not having chil'ren...yet.

 

Edited by Iceman
Posted
1 hour ago, Jkwellborn said:

Plenty of people out there have no business with kids. Hopefully, they are at least some of the ones not having them.

Maybe you're right...

How has the distribution of ages in Oklahoma changed?

The share of the population that is 0 to 4 years old decreased from 7% in 2010 to 6.1% in 2022.

The share of the population that is 65 and older increased from 13.5% in 2010 to 16.4% in 2022.

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Posted

I don’t doubt that birth rates are down and etc etc etc but also I can tell you that in Wake Forest at least (I guess think Round Rock for Raleigh) you can spend years on the waitlists for the good daycares. We had our 2 year old on the waitlist for where he is now since my wife was pregnant and he only recently got in, I know that a couple of the other ones nearby are similar. And then there are other places where they consistently have vacancies.

Posted
6 hours ago, chainsaw said:

Nobody has the money for it.

This isn't fully accurate: they don't have the money to raise them to the standards they have today, which are far higher than all previous generations. 

6 hours ago, Jkwellborn said:

Plenty of people out there have no business with kids. Hopefully, they are at least some of the ones not having them.

The people having kids are probably not the ones you'd have highest on your list of desirable parents and gene pools and the people having the fewest children, or none at all, are probably highest on the list. 

Posted
11 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

This isn't fully accurate: they don't have the money to raise them to the standards they have today, which are far higher than all previous generations. 

I read the context of the comment you quoted as saying nobody has the money to afford childcare. Did you read it differently? Because in my experience just being able to find any kind of daycare that has openings is almost next to impossible, and of course the prices reflect the scarcity. I seem to recall that there was some sort of change with the ACA that increased insurance requirements or something along those lines for providers to the point that a lot of churches that offered childcare services had to get out of the business. Whether it was a real or percieved change in policy, there was a definite exit of churches and other religious institutions from the childcare marketplace, which has left us with a demand rich and supply poor marketplace to the detriment of young parents. 

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Posted
7 hours ago, chainsaw said:

Nobody has the money for it.

33 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

This isn't fully accurate: they don't have the money to raise them to the standards they have today, which are far higher than all previous generations. 

 

Is this were Gen X'ers come in to brag about being raised ferel?

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Posted
37 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

I read the context of the comment you quoted as saying nobody has the money to afford childcare. Did you read it differently? Because in my experience just being able to find any kind of daycare that has openings is almost next to impossible, and of course the prices reflect the scarcity. I seem to recall that there was some sort of change with the ACA that increased insurance requirements or something along those lines for providers to the point that a lot of churches that offered childcare services had to get out of the business. Whether it was a real or percieved change in policy, there was a definite exit of churches and other religious institutions from the childcare marketplace, which has left us with a demand rich and supply poor marketplace to the detriment of young parents. 

I see that your first comment was regarding child care but I didn't take his broad comment as specifically related to child care costs. 

To attempt to answer your question, I imagine church- specific child care availability is pretty dependent on the state, region, or city due to cultural and regulatory variances among other factors, though I don't doubt there's been an overall decline in these providers. The majority of the decline, however, has been in small home- based child care providers: 

image.thumb.gif.b296e598faee648bd81767198b6676ed.gif

This obviously impacts lower income families the most but also probably drives prices higher for all income levels. My larger point, however, is that our expectations are higher than ever. People used to rely far more heavily on stay at home parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors for child care. These don't meet most parents' standards anymore (we need/want 2 incomes to achieve the lifestyle we want, we don't want to move near family who could help, we see the friends, neighbors and home-based care options as substandard), and they don't meet government standards either, as regulations have cut out many of the in-home providers and driven up prices at centers. I'm not saying, especially in this specific example that this is all bad! I'm only saying it's a higher standard. 

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Posted
10 hours ago, Rimbo said:

For reasons unrelated to anything, I was in a discussion today and learned that locally, preschools are struggling to get full enrollment. Which reminded me that I'm Gen X and that this can be a problem if kids aren't born. So I looked it up.

image.thumb.png.3883205a19de1b9260e0868a8ce612c5.png

Kids aren't being born.

It's not as bad as that extreme low point, the nadir of Gen X when Nicole and I managed to scream our way out of our mothers' guts, but it's low.Note that this is the absolute number of births, not even the birth rate. Which is as you'd expect.

  Hide contents

 

 

image.thumb.png.8f4a3e09242b7ea9f733bf129bfe5cb8.png

 

The rate is abysmal, as you'd expect.

Anyway. Pretty dang interesting to me that the actual number of births is so low. This will have some pretty severe economic implications a quarter of a century from now.

But we're already seeing it affect preschools.

Well, I guess you've never watched a Peter Zeihan video on youtube. Every third one relates to various demographic catastrophes happening around the world, but particularly in Russia and China.

Long story short, there's almost nowhere in the world where births and birth rates AREN'T declining. It's not a US problem, is a worldwide problem. Now there's plenty of reasons. As many posters here have pointed out, there's a very large trend with the young here in the US where they don't feel they can afford a family, what with the housing costs, the cost of living, and the cost of health insurance, unsteady job market, etc. This is also reflected dual income households...both parents need to work. This has existed for awhile.

Another relevant point is that...we're not an agrarian culture anymore. Families aren't having kids anymore because they don't need free labor. Then you've got the social ineptitude/disinterest things you're starting to see here in America, and which has exited in Japan for awhile. Kids don't want to fuck. 

There's dozens of different reasons, and they're somewhat different in each country. But The last thing I read is that while America is in decline for births and birth rates, we're actually one of the countries declining the least rapidly compared to much of the rest of the world. Another interesting point is that, demographically, it also makes sense for America to increase immigration to combat this issue. Of course, we don't have any jobs or manufacturing to support that, but it's a thing to consider. 

image.png.9f9818eab21241a4d5bd8f78048621ea.png

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

 

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Posted

This is pretty simple.

Tone Loc releases Wild Thing in late 1988.

Birth rates have their last notable peak in 1990.

Science.

Sure, some biologists and scholars still try to tout the "Take My Breath Away" effect of 1986.

But come on, we know it's Loc.

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Posted

Expansive access to contraceptives, later marriages, fewer forced marriages, education and professional opportunities for women, formal social safety nets for seniors, plunging childhood mortality. All leads to a rational choice for high investment, high intensity parenting of fewer kids as opposed to low-investment production of lots of kids. Holds true across cultures.

Whats interesting is that things like parental leave and subsidies for kids probably further incentivize “invest more in fewer kids” as opposed to “have more kids.” 
 

There should be no beating about the bush: this is going to cause some short and medium term pain even if over the long term it will create more stability and be more sustainable. 
 

More interesting than declining birth-rates is to track what this model of parenting (high-investment, fewer kids) does to sex ratios. The picture is not pretty for big swathes of the world where they have adopted this model but retain a bias in favor of men. Fewer young people and more of them males with literally not enough women to pair off with. 

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Posted (edited)
47 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Well, I guess you've never watched a Peter Zeihan video on youtube. Every third one relates to various demographic catastrophes happening around the world, but particularly in Russia and China.

Long story short, there's almost nowhere in the world where births and birth rates AREN'T declining. It's not a US problem, is a worldwide problem. Now there's plenty of reasons. As many posters here have pointed out, there's a very large trend with the young here in the US where they don't feel they can afford a family, what with the housing costs, the cost of living, and the cost of health insurance, unsteady job market, etc. This is also reflected dual income households...both parents need to work. This has existed for awhile.

Another relevant point is that...we're not an agrarian culture anymore. Families aren't having kids anymore because they don't need free labor. Then you've got the social ineptitude/disinterest things you're starting to see here in America, and which has exited in Japan for awhile. Kids don't want to fuck. 

There's dozens of different reasons, and they're somewhat different in each country. But The last thing I read is that while America is in decline for births and birth rates, we're actually one of the countries declining the least rapidly compared to much of the rest of the world. Another interesting point is that, demographically, it also makes sense for America to increase immigration to combat this issue. Of course, we don't have any jobs or manufacturing to support that, but it's a thing to consider. 

image.png.9f9818eab21241a4d5bd8f78048621ea.png

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

 

 

8 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Expansive access to contraceptives, later marriages, fewer forced marriages, education and professional opportunities for women, formal social safety nets for seniors, plunging childhood mortality. All leads to a rational choice for high investment, high intensity parenting of fewer kids as opposed to low-investment production of lots of kids. Holds true across cultures.

Whats interesting is that things like parental leave and subsidies for kids probably further incentivize “invest more in fewer kids” as opposed to “have more kids.” 
 

There should be no beating about the bush: this is going to cause some short and medium term pain even if over the long term it will create more stability and be more sustainable. 
 

More interesting than declining birth-rates is to track what this model of parenting (high-investment, fewer kids) does to sex ratios. The picture is not pretty for big swathes of the world where they have adopted this model but retain a bias in favor of men. Fewer young people and more of them males with literally not enough women to pair off with. 

Two spot-on posts.  It's a complex issue, and there needs to be some complex approaches to addressing both the issue of low birth rates AND the impact they will cause (because, spoiler: we aren't going to completely reverse the trend and get back above replacement rate anytime soon).

I'll suggest that our American policy and social approach of "hate immigrants," "try to force women to be submissive baby factories again," and "make society and the economy hostile to any chance of a healthy economic future for young people" is both doomed to fail and actually even backfire.  Just a thought.

Edited by Brisketexan
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Posted
30 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

I didn't know there were so many people that hadn't noticed this already. 

 

yeah same here.

And actually, the rate of the rate has been slowing down since the 1970s in most of the (then) developed, western world. 

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Posted

The #1 factor in our declining birthrate is the decline in teen pregnancy. Nothing else even comes close to contributing as much to it. Women in their 20s and 30s are barely having  any fewer kids than they did before. 
 

/rant, it’s also not 1955 anymore and it’s pretty annoying to hear people talk about population decline like it’s any kind of problem. There is zero negative to it. We have AI, we have robotics and other automation. We don’t need as many people as we once did for economic production.

Posted
2 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

I read the context of the comment you quoted as saying nobody has the money to afford childcare. Did you read it differently? Because in my experience just being able to find any kind of daycare that has openings is almost next to impossible, and of course the prices reflect the scarcity. I seem to recall that there was some sort of change with the ACA that increased insurance requirements or something along those lines for providers to the point that a lot of churches that offered childcare services had to get out of the business. Whether it was a real or percieved change in policy, there was a definite exit of churches and other religious institutions from the childcare marketplace, which has left us with a demand rich and supply poor marketplace to the detriment of young parents. 

They're leaving because they can't fill their rosters.

I can tell you in my neighborhood, there's some really top tier preschools that are struggling to get enough enrollment, to the point where they're concerned.

Posted
38 minutes ago, staboner said:

yeah same here.

And actually, the rate of the rate has been slowing down since the 1970s in most of the (then) developed, western world. 

See, the rate HAS been declining, but it was made up for by the overall population being higher.

What's new here is that in the past few years the absolute number of births is so low. And it's not like Gen Z is small or anything...

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Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, Celery Man said:

you can spend years on the waitlists for the good daycares.

That's just a supply and demand problem. Day cares have so much liability to worry about, and it's expensive to run one. Not a glamorous or well-paying career, so it's hard to find help. This is exactly the kind of endeavor where the free market simply cannot and will not meet the needs of the community. The only way to get this done would be with a taxpayer-funded approach. Universal child care.

Edited by chainsaw
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Posted
3 hours ago, KYHorn said:

This isn't fully accurate: they don't have the money to raise them to the standards they have today

1280px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.s

 

A normal 1970s/1980s-style latch key kid upbringing, in today's world of mass-surveillance, NextDoor Karens, and hall monitors, is completely impossible. Society is no longer accustomed to seeing children under the age of 10 wandering the neighborhood unaccompanied. People are being arrested for leaving their children at home while running errands. Technically illegal, I suppose. But look at how much our prison population has jumped over the last 50 years. It's never been easier to get convicted of a crime.

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Posted
15 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

1280px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.s

 

A normal 1970s/1980s-style latch key kid upbringing, in today's world of mass-surveillance, NextDoor Karens, and hall monitors, is completely impossible. Society is no longer accustomed to seeing children under the age of 10 wandering the neighborhood unaccompanied. People are being arrested for leaving their children at home while running errands. Technically illegal, I suppose. But look at how much our prison population has jumped over the last 50 years. It's never been easier to get convicted of a crime.

I wonder what happened in 1980 that changed the slope of that curve. 
image.thumb.jpeg.40ec31df61f386e462a3cde3629f36cd.jpeg

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/private-prison-industry-overview

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Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, Redneck Mutha said:

Idiocracy - IGN

Was going to post something like this.

Birth rates plummet for responsible people groups and they explode for marginal, disadvantaged and developing people groups. I think that's a tale as old as time. Going from hundreds of years ago with the Irish and Italians to the Mexicans of the last two or three generations in America to globally the highest growth regions being the poor areas of Sub-Sahara Africa and Bangladesh and the like.

Just based on pure brute force numbers, the world power and hegemony will be a brown persons world sooner than later IMO.

Edited by Vegas64
Posted

My son has a group of five friends that are married with children, all in their mid-20s. As of now, two couples are divorced. The husbands lost half their shit, and are on the hook for well over a decade of child support. Both of the husbands now have had to move back in with their parents to make ends meet. With divorce rates at 50%, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to know you don't want to get yourself into that situation. Both situations, the wives cheated, but still ended up with half of everything and a paycheck.

CHIEF

Posted
32 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

My son has a group of five friends that are married with children, all in their mid-20s. As of now, two couples are divorced. The husbands lost half their shit, and are on the hook for well over a decade of child support. Both of the husbands now have had to move back in with their parents to make ends meet. With divorce rates at 50%, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to know you don't want to get yourself into that situation. Both situations, the wives cheated, but still ended up with half of everything and a paycheck the money and all the pussy.

CHIEF

FIFY

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Posted
56 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

My son has a group of five friends that are married with children, all in their mid-20s. As of now, two couples are divorced. The husbands lost half their shit, and are on the hook for well over a decade of child support. Both of the husbands now have had to move back in with their parents to make ends meet. With divorce rates at 50%, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to know you don't want to get yourself into that situation. Both situations, the wives cheated, but still ended up with half of everything and a paycheck.

CHIEF

Divorce rates for Millennials are below Boomers and Gen X.

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Posted
4 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

Well, I guess you've never watched a Peter Zeihan video on youtube. Every third one relates to various demographic catastrophes happening around the world, but particularly in Russia and China.

Long story short, there's almost nowhere in the world where births and birth rates AREN'T declining. It's not a US problem, is a worldwide problem. Now there's plenty of reasons. As many posters here have pointed out, there's a very large trend with the young here in the US where they don't feel they can afford a family, what with the housing costs, the cost of living, and the cost of health insurance, unsteady job market, etc. This is also reflected dual income households...both parents need to work. This has existed for awhile.

Another relevant point is that...we're not an agrarian culture anymore. Families aren't having kids anymore because they don't need free labor. Then you've got the social ineptitude/disinterest things you're starting to see here in America, and which has exited in Japan for awhile. Kids don't want to fuck. 

There's dozens of different reasons, and they're somewhat different in each country. But The last thing I read is that while America is in decline for births and birth rates, we're actually one of the countries declining the least rapidly compared to much of the rest of the world. Another interesting point is that, demographically, it also makes sense for America to increase immigration to combat this issue. Of course, we don't have any jobs or manufacturing to support that, but it's a thing to consider. 

image.png.9f9818eab21241a4d5bd8f78048621ea.png

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

 

I would be happy to help out in any of those countries.  

8 3 4

5 7 6

2 9 1

/username and all that

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Posted (edited)
2 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

Divorce rate for married couples

well see now I'm wondering if it's normalized for time married, although I would assume it is, and I bet if you peeled the layers back that there may be some cutural generational stuff but that there is a corresponding "more divorces for people getting married young, and millennials get married older" thing at the bottom of it.

Edited by Celery Man
Posted
10 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I would be happy to help out in any of those countries.  

8 3 4

5 7 6

2 9 1

/username and all that

I find your order bizarre. No love for Chinese or South Korean, but India is 3rd? 

Posted (edited)
19 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I find your order bizarre. No love for Chinese or South Korean, but India is 3rd? 

Hey man, I have love for all of them.  Like Baskin Robbins, I love all the flavors.  There are no x's.  

If I had my druthers, they'd all be 1.  But I can't eat all the flavors at once.  

Plus China has too many dudes to compete with anyhow, and Russia is just out of favor with me right now.  Further, the Indian subcontinent holds a special place in young Chad's spiritual, ahem, awakening.  And there aren't any Latin countries on the list, so if you're down with the brown, then India has to be pretty high up there.  

 

Edited by Chad Fuck
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Posted
1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I do not understand how Denmark and Sweden finish off the podium here. 

There's no accounting for personal taste, so I'm not hating, but yes. I'm going:

Sweden/Denmark 1a/1b, South Korea, China, Spain, US, India, Kenya, Russia, in that order. 

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Posted
1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

There's no accounting for personal taste, so I'm not hating, but yes. I'm going:

Sweden/Denmark 1a/1b, South Korea, China, Spain, US, India, Kenya, Russia, in that order. 

i-get-it-snoop-dogg.gif

But...

i-said-what-i-said-snoop-dogg.gif

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Posted
1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

There's no accounting for personal taste, so I'm not hating, but yes. I'm going:

Sweden/Denmark 1a/1b, South Korea, China, Spain, US, India, Kenya, Russia, in that order. 

If you’re just going for more…carnal encounters then unfortunately I’m putting Russia much higher. And inflicting Surlyites on them is kind of a punishment so……

1. Denmark 2. Sweden 3. South Korea 4. Spain 5. Russia 6. China 7. U.S. 8. Kenya 9. India

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