Meant to write about this the other week but alas not... and today is the day:
The author, Stephen Shaw, even has a (peer-reviewed!!) article in Nature on the phenomenon with the non-catchy title "On a microdemographic framework for decomposing contemporary fertility dynamics".
"We don’t get to choose to become parents. We get to hope to become one."
from the data that hope is far more fragile than we might like to admit. Yet we have built our lives around the assumption that becoming a parent remains largely within our control, right up to some mythical cliff around the age of 35. Therein lies the untruth at the heart of the debate around fertility which has been raging
I got recommended Birthgap, the documentary that Shaw spent the last decade or so making, and found it extraordinary and captivating. It's two bloody hours, but I watched it all in one dinner/post-dinner sitting.
Warning: I never felt more blackpilled than after that. Hopeless etc.
Earlier this year, the UN published a flagship report covering more than 70 nations, rich and poor alike. It found that among childless 35 to 39-year-olds, over 70 per cent of women still want children. For men it is even higher, at almost 80 per cent.
That follows a report titled The Real Fertility Crisis, published by the UN in 2025, again spanning richer and poorer nations. It concluded that millions of people are unable to have the number of children they want.
But it's not family size or the number of kids a mother has... it's the number of people who become parents! Childlessness is the disease.
Through decades of increasing educational and career opportunities for women, the ups and downs of economic cycles, and enormous shifts in cultural norms, from Japan to the UK to the US, mothers have been having around the same number of children as prior recent generations. But instead of a trend to smaller families, childlessness since the 1970s has rocketed.
Also, it's not true that the feminist lady boss (who thinks promiscuous sex is a goddarwin-given right and never wants to rent out her womb to the patriarchy...) is everywhere:
And only a small minority, ranging from around 4 to 14 per cent and averaging about 7 per cent, said their ideal was no children at all, lower than most of us have come to believe given the headlines in the media these days.
"If today’s fertility patterns hold, nearly 40 per cent of women in these nations will remain childless for life, against just 7 per cent who say that is what they want."
Explanations? The pill, screens, (relative) poverty, housing market?
Nope, just a broken societal/matching-up culture:
The strongest explanation I have found, though I would stop short of calling it proven, is what researchers call pair-bonding: finding the right person, settling down and, often but not always, getting married.
Model that across a population and the pattern appears. As parenthood is pushed later, the odds that two people will find each other and commit fall in a predictable curve, just like the one we find across all 40 nations in my research, without exception. More time to find a match produces more single people, and consequently fewer parents.
Two people can each be doing everything “right,” genuinely want a family, and still miss each other, because success now depends on someone else’s timing too, not just your own. That makes it hard to point the finger at childless people, as Perrins does, and say they simply didn’t want it enough.
Incredible:
Here the take-away in Twitter form:
"trying hard enough barely comes into it. Finding your match is personal. Matching is a societal phenomenon. And societies that delay parenthood aren't helping themselves."
[Children-per-Mother] has been remarkably stable (mothers aren’t having dramatically fewer kids once they start), while [Total-Maternal Rate] has shown sharp, shock-like drops (more women simply never becoming mothers).
I watched the movie, very interesting.
He seems to fasten on mostly one thing causing the severe drop in birthrate, and that is - a strong economic shock in the target country.
That's not what I'm reading from other sources. It appears to most strongly corelated to female education, is what I'm reading.
spicy, spicy. What's your best story/source/medium for that? As in: your best non-stupid article/documentary etc?
Dude. Birthgap has been on my to-watch list for months now. Perhaps I haven't watched it cause I can already sense the black pill
I have a nostr vlog episode recorded where I touch upon this topic as well. Should get around to uploading it ...
And IDK... "finding your match" sounds a lot like the entitlement mindset people seem to have nowadays. We seem to have the illusion that there is a Ms or Mr Right out there somewhere that checks all the boxes and fulfills all our dreams. While declining to better ourselves and/or make compromises in order to make relationships work. And stuff like Tinder and the internet in general gives this false sense that there is always a second (better?) option around the corner, or behind the next swipe or whatever.
That's craaazy right, my friend
I would have thought that having tech like Tinder where you can find exactly what you want would make breeding easy.
I was kinda lucky in that I snapped out of a few bad decisions I made early on in life and ended up having some kids. Before I'd always thought that the world was just a terrible place to bring someone into. Around the age of 40 I started feeling unsatisfied in my work and hobbies. Looks like it's pretty common.
Anyway @denlillaapan maybe it's time you started writting less and started getting "busy" on some babies.
not mutually exclusive!! (also, what makes you think I'm not busying on that front?!)
Just a bit of speculation
You get to choose to bring kids into a beautiful world, that you create for them. The greatest gift you can give a child is life and a good childhood, you may not be able to control the world, but you have control over how you bring up your family.
Yeah, it’s crazy. My wife had a medical condition, not covered under insurance. We had to pay $35,000 just to attempt IVF to have our first son so yeah it’s kind of crazy when you’re a little bit older having children and not having the money to pay for it and with pressure & stress and having to go through things like IVF and injecting your wife with tons of steroids like Lance Armstrong.
That's insane, I assume you live in the US? I don't understand the cult of private healthcare over there, I currently live in Spain, here anyone understands that healthcare isn't a business, for almost 40 years (since 1988), social security has covered this expense, we all have the right to be parents
Fuck, I'm sorry man. Hope it worked out in the end
I have two sisters, both in their mid-thirties now. No children. Not likely they are going to have children.
When I think about the difference between myself and them, it's that I found a partner much earlier than they did (more than ten years?)
Anecdotally, I remember my sisters talking about wanting to have their hearts broken (as a sort of fantasy) and that they didn't want to settle down until they had experienced some tragic, romantic relationship.
Seems like there may have been some sort of Chesterton fence in traditional culture that made clear divisions between mens and womens roles and that put up weird taboos around sex.
they seem to have been unfortunately influenced by weird pop culture notions of what a desirable life trajectory is
Yup, 100%.
Sorry to hear about your sisters' troubles :/ that's a sad loss
I feel like most of this rant has aged well: #496016
Here’s the big question though: Why is matching getting worse across the entire world?
indeed.
I don't recall reading this, but I have a comment from a year and a half ago...
yesssiiir.
I routinely come back to this... going to college was a mistake (#980195).
...BUT, do you think your judge of character/the sort of person you/most people were with at age ~17 is a) best for you, b) perhaps inferior in some character match-sense but good enough so that starting a family with them in your 20s would have still put you in a better place 10-15 years later?
Basically, it's not the who you're with but the when? But if, as you say, the who is so incredibly important... maybe it is/was better for most youngsters to wait until college/after to find their partner?
Note that my advice isn’t to settle down with your high school sweetheart. Rather, it’s to give those relationships enough time to decide if you’re with the right person.
I do think there’s a lot to your b) point. In search theory, the optimal solution isn’t to hold out for the very best thing to stumble across your path. The optimal outcome involves weighing the ongoing costs of search against the benefits of taking the best option currently available (intentional oversimplification).
Basically, if you found someone who you can be happy building a life with, lock that down because you won’t encounter it often.
I recall this "37%"/Secretary rule (had to google the name, lol) that you should go through slightly more than a third and reject everything, and then pick the best you see thereafter. I can't grasp the logic behind it (@SimpleStacker or whoever needs needs to write up the rundown of this: https://statwizard.substack.com/p/when-you-should-marry-and-settle).
It's as good as any way to balance accumulating search cost with running out of time. (And, I posit: we also suck at knowing what is/isn't good for us or who we are, so just doing it will both teach you that and become good/good enough over time)
What is sick, is in America the anti-life, anti-christian, anti-God, democrats KILL their own babies, and this is even legal in states they control. Then they target the children of others that survived abortion (by their parents choosing life) with their own transgenderism ideologies to recruit them into their death cult, and they try to convince the children into cutting their reproductive parts off so that THEY cannot reproduce. If they cannot kill their own babies through abortion, they target the children of others for permanent damage.
The democrats in USA are EVIL and of the devil.
Ugh, as if I need more content to make me feel bad about the world.
Get ready to say your shahadas, I suppose.
Imma pretend that is know what shahadas means
The good news is that all those stupid feminists (and homosexuals by default), by not reproducing, die without leaving a legacy... therefore, when a generation passes, we won't have them among us anymore.
Screw them.
that might be true... but they (and the boomers... #1598264) are sort of pulling us with them over the edge
Weak men create difficult times.....!!