Late stage capitalism.
Having kids is really expensive and insane amount of responsibility. Childcare is a full time job - so you need to go one worker per family, or be able to afford paying for it.

Nowadays, it's expected and often necessary for both people in a relationship to work full-time and have a career if they want to maintain a decent living standard. No time or money for having kids.

Only get pregnant if you can afford it.

OK

No, not like that

It will differ by country but I've seen some poll from Poland recently:

For those few that don't speak polish:

1. I don't need kids (37%)
2. I can't afford it (20%)
3. I'm worried about wars and instability (14%)
4. Poorly working healthcare system (13%)
5. I don't have the right partner
6. I'm worried about unemployment
7. Not enough support form the government
8. Being a parent is too hard
9. I'm worried about climate change
10. Other (20%)
11. I don't know (14%)

My take is "How can I afford to have a kid when I can't even take care of myself?".

Late stage capitalism.

When it is already hard to save up and buy a house before it's too late for you and your partner to be capable of conceiving, is it any surprise?

I know plenty of people who would have a kid but don't because they simply can't afford to

We're like pandas in captivity. We'll fuck if the conditions are right. They haven't been right in a loooooong time. A little bit of enrichment in our enclosures would help tremendously.

The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they'll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then

Countries can't have children, they're not alive.

Have you seen how the world is doing?

Here are my reasons:

• We are already starting to feel the effects of global warming, it will only get worse and people don't take it serious. Why should Ibput another soul into this world just to suffer from the stupidity of others?
• Child care is super expensive and quality isn't great and being a stay at home parent isn't really an option if you want too keep up in the work market place.
• Why should I have a kid, if I'm not gonna spend time with them? I mean to feed them & offer them all the anemities, me and my partner would need to work full-time, so when are we gonna spend time with our kid?
• edit see bellow why.
• I like my freedoms.
• The schooling system is shit. Why should I raise kids in a society that starts the "grind" at age 5 and keeps you going until you are 65?
• etc.

I can't prove it but I suspect that they are having about as many children as they want and our expectations of 'fertility rates' are actually skewed by the number of unwanted pregnancies that were forced on people who then existed in the space of 'We didn't ask for this but now we love the little shit so I guess we'll make the best of it.' The world is and has been changing so fast for the last century or so that our sense of long term trends is much harder to understand.

I really, really dislike children

I have an amazing life, and the way I live is completely incompatible with kids, even if I wanted them

More people are realising that it's not compulsory to breed, and that they can have vastly better lives without children

Other activities outcompete children.

The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they'd rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.

That's for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don't scale as well as they used to.

Opportunity to do something else with your life. Kids are unaffordable. World is going to shit.

Here's the thing: lower birth rates are actually a sign of a more developed country. There are a number of reasons for this. If you can't be sure if the system will properly take care of you in your late years, people tend to have more children so that there will be someone to take care of them in old age. If people (especially women) are better educated, there will be more of a focus on persuing careers, and children can be an impediment to that. Also, if people have better access to healthcare and birth control, many will use it. Just a couple of examples.

As the average income of a country goes up, birthrate goes down. That's just how humans are. We guess at reasons, but it's just a universally observable fact.

All high income industrialized nations developed low birthrates. North america, europe, japan, korea and now china.

If rich nations allow room for anyone else to claw their way up out of the low end of the value chain, we'll see the same thing happen there.

Feminism/Equality and the changes it has brought.

This isn't a bad thing, which is important to get out early because some far-right groups use it as an example for why we should wind back the clock.

Most women in advanced countries work, they have and want to have meaningful careers. Having children conflicts with that, in the immediate significant time off, and the long term impact of being the default parent when they have issues at school or are sick.

Lifestyles in advanced countries really rely on two incomes. Stopping work for a significant period to raise multiple children is a significant impact on that income, plus the long term expenses of the child combine to reduce that lifestyle. Not having children, or reducing the number, can be an economic choice.

The culture of both parents working also impacts the support network. Your working, your friends are working, the village is behind a desk not supporting you.

Finally women get a choice now, which is a change that is recent, isn't global and doesn't seem to be as widely acknowledged as it should be.

Society needs to change to address these issues and provide these missing supports. Which is going to take time, but as they are addressed we will probably see the birth rates start to climb again.

capitalism

I know 30-somethings that live with their parents because they cannot afford their own house and there are no decent rental houses available either.

Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.

People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.

Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?

Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.

Education time and income instability. People are well into their 30s before they know where to settle down after finishing an education. They're well into their 40s before they can afford to.

If any country wanted to increase childbirth rates, they ought to lower working time, increase education pay and move employment out of the central cities.

Or put simply: Money and time needs to be available for the people they want to reproduce.

Now, I just saw the latest Kurzgesagt episode on this, and there's one thing they missed: Automation. We don't necessarily need to keep a stable or increasing population if only we can automate a lot more labour. In my opinion it's the only solution to avoid the future population crisis.

The fragmentation of multigenerational households. Without that support network, raising children is much harder and more expensive and much, much more daunting.

The main reason, that for some reason no one talked about yet, is that we developed and have effective and cheap contraceptives.

All other concerns are almost irrelevant. The truth is that we are very driven by immediate desires, and the "later" problem of having children goes out of the window when you're horny and have the opportunity to have sex. If there's no access to contraceptives, the choice between having sex and having children, or not having sex and no children, is almost always won by "having sex".

But if you can have access to contraceptives, you do not have to chose between sex and no sex anymore. The reality is just that children have always been more inconvenient than not. I'm sure if at any point in history (or even in a perfectly utopian society) if contraceptives were developed and made available, and weren't before, the same thing would happen.

Everything is so god damn expensive. And it gets worse every single day.

Don't worry though, no country is really worried about it yet because if they were they would work on making things not so obscenely fucking ridiculously expensive. (Although knowing rich bastards they'd probably just let humanity die out before they lost 5¢ on every sale)

Or at least give some sort if credit to you to lift the burden a bit. I think maybe South Korea is doing this and some Nordic countries and even China too I believe.

But still, if you have to get the calculator out and figure out how many meals you need to skip this month to be able to pay your bills I think having sex is the last thing on your mind.

Shit, most people probably ran their mates off already from the insane, soul crushing, non stop fucking stress that being able to never get ahead in your entire life brings. Bonus points if you already had a child with them, now you get to have 25% if your income stolen from you for the next 18 years (25 if they go to college) even if you see them more than they do in a lot of instances. That will sure get you in the mood.

And if not its still hard to want to fuck when you're hungry or when you're constantly about to lose it all and barely hanging on by a thread and obsessing about that reality in your head every single second of every single day.

TLDR: shit is too god damn expensive and it just keeps getting worse with absolutely no end in sight.

You can only raise kids properly if you can afford it.

Here in Northern Sweden the preschools in the cities are all closing down due to lack of kids. We have the opposite problem in the villages. Long waiting lists and shortages. Our municipality, population 5000, has 6 existing preschools and just built a new one. City housing costs more than 3 times as much as the villages and small towns. Families can't afford housing in the city. It's all rich retired people in the larger houses and young single people in tiny apartments.

i personally am afraid that my child would live through a terrible future. also: i just dont feel like it. so maybe the existential anciety is more subconcious? idk

There's only one culprit here, and it's 100% responsible for this phenomenon: Countries can't have children. Only People can have children.

Isn't it obvious?

They don’t want to.

Over here in Spain it’s because of lack of funding. Theres little to no support for child care, if you have a kid here your either working tooth to the bone or off well and even still you only have 1 kid because 2 is too expensive.

Because landmasses don't have reproductive organs with which to procreate.

japan and SOUTH korea have this insane work culture, that your lives or to live at your job, and must be drinking with t he bosses after. also heavily ostracized if you arnt making it in those countries. SK is apparently at a worst position than JAPAN birthwise goes.

china is currently have thier own crisis, thier 1-child policy has a created a deficiency of women , thats why they have become so obsessed of tracking womens lives, plus trying to "encourage sex. they also overproduce stem graduates with no job markets going around too. all this associated with HCOL as well.

plus the poor job markets for stem majors, even with tech laying off you can still find a job somewhere. but other stem have alot more requirements to enter the field. biotech, bio, Psyche if you think you can get away by not getting a PsyD or phd.

women getting education is a major factor of having less or no children, thats why there has been significant initiative in many universitis to help woman get experience in stem, like bio degrees. this does has unintentional effect of leaving men behind in bio specifically.