They should focus more on the fact that income hasn't risen to account for a number of expenses that makes it very impractical to have children (debt, schooling, housing, loans, etc.). This is what I feel is contributing more to the fact of lower births.
Even in European countries with generous support systems, subsidized day care, free university and paid parental leave the birthrate has plummeted (below the US in most instances).
So I am not sure that it is the cost, just rather a re-orientation of values that has been slowly taking place with the advent of birth control, plentiful food, etc. Human beings were all about the next generation for survival reasons by genetic design even if they didn't want to be.
Because the younger generations have to shoulder that. There is a reason people believe that future generation will have it worse and that undoubtedly has consequences for birth rates.
Subsidized day care and paid parental leave doesn't make up for just how much work it is to raise a child in modern times (unlike the old days where you just hoped they survived the first few years, and pretty quickly didn't bother investing much more work into them and left them to fend for themselves).
Before the "nuclear family" became a thing, people lived with their extended relatives, and raising children wasn't as much work.
That wouldn't make any sense for the article, which focuses on medical data. There's definitely a place to write about and discuss the subjective reasons people have for opting out of having kids (like earth possibly being on fire soon) but that doesn't have anything to do with fertility, birth weights, pre term delivery or any of the other things addressed here.
> I think this is really more about women having lives outside the home...
I'm sure this is part of it, but a lot of men also don't want kids. I've broken up with two LTR's in the past 5 years because they were ready for marriage and kids, but I have already seen several male peers go through messy divorces where they were treated very unfairly by the family court system: losing custody, large spousal and child support payments that left them as basically indentured servants for the next decade or two, etc.
I always assumed I'd have kids, but I've changed my mind, at least if I stay in the US. While it's great that women have gained so much equality in the last 50 years, the family court system is still heavily biased against men, remnants from a time when women could not support themselves.
>I always assumed I'd have kids, but I've changed my mind, at least if I stay in the US.
The US is a terrible place to have kids. It's not just the family court system; this is a country where you can be arrested for letting your child run around outside without supervision, where you have to worry about your kid being killed in a school shooting, where you can't let your kid walk to school, where college costs are astronomical, where the teen suicide rate is very high and rising, I could go on and on. It's just not a healthy place to raise children. If you want kids, you should move to a better country for it, like any place in western Europe.
