Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?

in 2008, 72 percent of college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had not yet had children.

There’s a reason I associated the forums with conservative types. It’s not particularly popular (or easy) to frame parenthood as aspirational when you hold the concerns of the left. At least not in my world. Sure, you can have kids as a leftist, but the primary conversations surrounding parenthood that I participated in concerned its problems: the

In rich countries, people generally want to have more kids than they end up having: Americans, for example, want to have 2.6 children on average but have only 1.8.34 In significant part this is because work and other commitments get in the way.

The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many othe

If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.

Women have internalized our own devaluation. No wonder many women with the privilege of making the choice are choosing not to have children. Child-rearing is arguably the most difficult path possible, a hero’s journey that leads us on harrowing adventures but for which we receive almost no credit.