Why are we having fewer and fewer children?

I know this is extremely far from what I’m used to write about on here, but I find this topic really important and interesting. Also, I think I might have a different opinion on this than the majority, so I felt the need to express myself a bit on my website 😊.

I turned 30 this year, and I can’t help but notice three things:

• There’s a lot of pressure for us to have kids
• Almost half of my friends don’t want kids
• I still don't want kids either 🤷🏻‍♂️

But why don’t we want kids? I ask myself this question quite often, because this is an important topic for me, and to be frank, I really hope my opinion will change someday.

In this article, I’ll try to be as neutral as I can to list and explain the biggest reasons I can think of, and why it's become so common these days to not want a child.

I think there are several huge factors in play: opportunity cost (career, freedom, income), the economic shift (a child costs something like €150-200K with no "return on investment"), contraception turning children from a default to a deliberate choice, urbanization making large families impractical, women's education opening other paths to fulfillment, etc.

All true, and while those things are probably very important in what’s happening today, I think you already know about them.

But all of this was already in place in the 80s and 90s, when birth rates were WAY higher than today.

In my opinion, what changed is our relationship with the future.

Previous generations had a roughly linear outlook: tomorrow would be better than today, or at least similar. You built things. Millennials and Gen Z grew up with 9/11, the 2008 crisis, climate change accelerating, COVID, inflation, housing becoming unaffordable. The dominant feeling shifted from "I'm building something" to "I'm adapting to whatever comes next."

But having a child is an act of faith. It means saying: “the world will be livable enough to be worth bringing someone into”. When that faith erodes, the desire for children fades with it. That’s my case.

It's not a rational calculation like "the IPCC predicts +3°C so I'm opting out." It's more diffuse: background anxiety, difficulty projecting into the future, a sense that the foundations aren't solid.

In a way, we might be observing in humans what we see in many animal species: when the environment feels hostile or unstable, reproduction slows down. The difference is that for us, the signal travels through consciousness and culture rather than physiology.

At some point, we’ll have to face it: we've built societies where it's individually rational not to have children. And we've added a layer of collective uncertainty that makes the future hard to imagine.

The result is predictable and is happening today.

Let’s hope it will get better soon 🤞🏻.

Thomas