What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

The data doesn't exactly support your argument though:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother

Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother:

* 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then

* 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 40-44 is higher than the 20th century except the 1960's

Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on. I don’t think people of yesteryear contemplated if they were ready to start a family. I don’t think they contemplated if a job was the “right fit”, and I doubt they scoured the world looking for their soulmate. So, if you live in our current time period where you are never “complete”, then you may have a hard time feeling confident about any next step.

Obviously the downside to this was that just about any idiot from yesteryear saw themselves perfectly qualified to start a family.

The solution is somewhere in the middle.

A minority of pregnancies end in a birth in nyc among black women. There are 70 million fewer Americans than otherwise.

  > Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

I said "a" reason.

Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?

>> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad

Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs.

> I mean, it was a thing for most of human history.

During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place.

For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone.

Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.

You don't have to be an "extinction apologist" or whatever to think that we'll probably solve the problem before we go from 7 BILLION people to not enough humans for healthy genetic diversity. We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.

I’m sorry, but calling anything but above-replacement birth rates as “slow-motion extinction” is ridiculous. This is the equivalent to expecting babies to be 15 meters tall by the time they’re adults from extrapolating their rate of growth in their infant years.

Below-replacement rate might be an economic issue around retirement, but as far as the human species goes, it’s a nothingburger at this scale. We’re not passenger pigeons.

Looming human extinction? The population is still growing.

> looming human extinction

https://populationmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Hea...

“Developed countries have reduced population growth” is a far cry from “looming human extinction”.

Looming human extinction? Bro, all you need to fix this "problem" in the West is more immigrants.

There’s plenty of countries with above replacement level fertility rates. This is a nothing burger

it is heavily politicized, atleast for the forseable future, until society reaches a conclusion, people will lie with statistics, smear their opponents in discussion as bigots, sexists, whatever.

But sooner or later it needs to be asked and acted upon. Should society structure itself to penalise abortions, and reward births of children.

Did our old religious and conservative societies where parents and grandparents helped together to give a great childhood to 2 or more children be something we need to bring back (for folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood, aborted children have NO childhood a death for themselves that they didnt choose). Should premarital intercourse be banned again or shunned ?

Religions have brought tons of miseries causing constant conflicts between communities, wars, allowing politicians and rulers to manipulate masses.

However, they also carried laws and doctrines refined over centuries, on philosophy, morality, and most importantly societal structure.

Monogamy itself and the construct of marriage was refined and finalized in all major religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc across several centuries (and in some cases greater than 1000 yrs).

One must consider, why did our ancestors come to certain conclusions globally regardless of faith around societal structure? What conditions did they want to create across society, to bring about prosperity or growth. Why were certain conservative and unpopular opinions regardless were imposed on men and women alike.

We should remove all the horrible stuff, things we can leave behind that our ancestors used to do sure. but throwing everything away is also not going to lead to anything good for us in the future.

Should abortion be readily accessible simply for the sake of liberty and freedom ? Should contraceptives be widely made available and promoted ? , should families force kids to be responsible for their actions again, and first try their best to give their newly born child a better life before allowed to just throw everything apart with divorces, single parent childhood, etc. Should premarital intercourse be banned , to encourage youth to form meaningful relationship instead of coasting between new girlfriends and boyfriends every new year ?

Im not saying we should do X, but these questions will need to be asked sooner or later, if western society or even asian societies want to survive (both have ultra low birthrates, china, japan, korea, russia, even india is now going the below tfr rate and will join them far sooner than was estimated within 20 yrs).

I really love european, american and asian societies and cultures, and i dont want them to die off, or perish away. Even my own culture's TFR is 0.98 for multiple decades and its perishing away quite fast too.

Hard questions will need to be asked in the future. It's not just a matter of what feels right to our emotional minds at a moment, but rather, whats best for society and cultures itself long term.

Not to mention, housing prices need to go way down, it needs to be removed from being a speculative asset or a way to whitewash black money, its wreaking havoc on whatever remaining part of society that does want kids, but cant afford to own a home by age of 30 even with double income household. We have enough land to house the entire world in each of the major countries, yet just out of sheer regulation, greed and laziness from politicians, policymakers, and banks who are afraid of the housing market crashing and causing problems for them, they are keeping this charade up.

There are many problems that need to be solved in coming decades, I hope each of our societies solve it.

This argument works both ways - many men can't find women they feel are qualified to be mothers.

Yeah its all too hard, easier to just stay childless and be done with it.

If you found one that didn’t life sucks. You are going to be a single mom either with one income or 2 but functionally single mom

They'll also reject this sort of man at the start of a relationship for being "too nice".

[citation needed]?

A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is:

> fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.

> Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.

This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.)

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...

The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published.

This is written about quite a bit.

One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.

thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation.

I will take a look at your linke tho

> they just don’t offer what it takes

You mean they're perceived to not offer what it takes. Of all phenomena, hypergamy is one of the best documented. And in my experience, as inequality grows so too does hypergamy.

Meh, I’ve never met a man who was incapable of doing what it takes. It’s not rocket surgery. Just mostly don’t be a dick and treat your wife how you’d want to be treated. If there’s anything more to it please let me know (for the sake of my marriage)

[flagged]

You have an office? They closed mine and told me I’m remote now.

My sister is one of these cases. My take is the bar for marriage / life partner is really really high in modern relationships. Women aren't able to attract the mates they want, so they would rather try to do it on their own or wait, than "settle" for a guy that isn't meeting their standards.

The female dating coach Logan Ury wrote a book called "How not to die alone" which discusses this issue.

Yes and that is too late and in the meantime have wasted 10 fertile years of 2 or 3 female partners.

I think I agree with you that though women could work in the ’50s, there weren’t really careers available to them in the same way as for men. Maybe it is just women having ‘real’ careers and therefore higher opportunity cost/more practical liberty/fulfilling alternatives to children making a big difference.

I guess what I’m getting at is that, even if you describe men’s desires accurately, I don’t think it describes their behaviour in my parents’ generation let alone mine. But maybe this just varies a lot by country/income/education/social class and I see some weird sample. I know divorce rates have become super divergent by education in the US for example so presumably relationships are quite different too.

Women can leave and get alimony, child support, and often times greater custody of the kids.

Men don’t want to take that risk, so many men opt out of marriage as well.

> In many HCOL cities, for many couples, SAHM isn't a financially feasible option.

Sure - a combination of a race to the bottom on working hourse and supply/demand for housing.

We need major tax breaks for single income households and to legalise building homes.

You all created this economic disaster with high taxes and high cost of living via your voting patterns and you own it now. I'm sure I'll be downvoted to hell for saying this, but it is, in fact, the truth.

As a counterpoint, I am a stay at home parent right now because I’m on paternity leave and it is by far the best time I’ve ever had in my life

Parenting subreddits have alot of the most extreme situations.

I have a child, alot of what I read on these internet groups isn't relatable.

"is hard" ≠ "sucks"

Everything worth doing is hard.

Making friends irl is hard when everyone has TVs and phones

You forgot the "/s", or do you actually believe that it's capitalism's fault is a mother taking care of her children is "unpaid labor" ?

I can think of some communism problems that are not capitalism problems. Central planners causing famine that kills millions not once but twice that I know of. Also reports from communist nations sound like living under communism sucks balls.

I suppose the Nordic socialist democracies are pretty nice. They probably have birth rates below replacement levels as well though. It turns out if you offer women the choice to have a career, enough of them take it that you drop below the replacement rate.

The cause and effect might be the other way around. When capital relaxes its grip on your neck a bit and when it loosens its fingers just a bit, people naturally produce more and there's more surplus for everyone. The economy is just human sweat and no one wants to sweat just to see their output go overwhelmingly to people who, basically by fluke and moral flexibility, control capital.

It came unwound when we allowed mass immigration to destroy the wages of the lower end and stopped building to respond to the housing demand. That can be easily undone, if the powers to be allowed it.

This explanation seems lacking to me. The same time period had a single-earner home-owning, baby-boom-raising middle class in places like Germany and Japan where entire cities had been completely obliterated by war. They didn't have as many cars or televisions as the Americans but they could pay their mortgage. And blowing up a whole bunch of productive infrastructure and capital worldwide is not the kind of thing you'd expect to contribute to gross material wealth. And gross wealth should be much higher now anyways, since we have so much more technology and better infrastructure.

The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?

You're talking about the widely known concept called the "demographic transition" and it has slowed, not accelerated, the death of the single-income household in the West because it's more affordable to support smaller families and to start families later in life.

> You can also hire a nanny.

Yes, or just have your servants watch them.

Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.

> It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.

Mostly women, and that helps keep the gender pay gap going.

I'm expecting a kid in Jan. It was sort of unexpected (earlier than planned by about a year!). I'm gonna be honest I had a really grim talk with my partner about finances... I don't make tech money right now and my partner is not in a high paid field.

You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.

I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.

I'm sorry dude, but you are clearly part of the 1%. No one I know can afford any of what you're suggesting. "Just take a sabbatical and put up the nanny in your guesthouse!"

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks.

In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.

Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.

Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.

Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.

Being a mom just sucks.

Which worked great when people had long retirements and were procreating early. Grandparents are working longer, older age when their children have children, and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.

I have been in tech for 7 years and it would be a stretch to afford the house I grew up in. Plus the commute to the city from my parents has increased from 45 minutes to 2 hours over the last 30 years. My high school recently closed down because families can't afford to live in the neighborhood.

same here. not near her parents but close enough to both hers and mine that we can effectively have them rotate through consistently (got a spare room and king sized bed for the g-parents).

even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.

As something of a tautology, when both parents have high paying jobs, child care can charge whatever they want. And they still have limited spaces, which the highly paid parents are now competing for.

It can be, but it's incredibly risky for women to stay home to take care of children. And, let's be honest - they're the ones actually putting in the effort here most of the time. Most women don't want to be at the complete financial behest of their husbands, nor do they want to risk missing out on a decade of work experience.

Revealed preference tells us people would rather have "no kids and 3 money" (credit to Homer Simpson).

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. This was my childhood. In the summer, I would play with the neighboorhood kids until dark and come home.

My mom would yell out the back door when it was time for dinner.

Look at the way our cities are built. I live in a grid based streetcar suburb and my kids can be let out feral. If you live in a modern subdivision ... Good luck. The roads are too big, and there is nowhere for kids to go. Meanwhile, my local city has free lunch at the park for kids every day during the summer and kids can go unaccompanied. I see tons of kids out riding bikes and walking by themselves.

Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.

It's mentioned in the piece:

As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”

Did you just make that up? I don't see what that has to do with the linked study

It worked for hundreds, or maybe, thousands of years. What we’ve been doing for just some decades is already leading to talks of population collapse.

Maybe that way wasn’t wrong.

While this may be true, it would be helpful if you would explain what the differences are and how they make the comparison useless.

It was just 60 years ago, and most cultures in the world today still practice this form of sexual modesty.

Yes..people in the past were celibate until marriage - what? Maybe some were, like som are now.

From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.

Neighbour countries are at 1.0x TFR, so that policy is quite effective.