I don't even need to read the article (sorry, OP), because over a decade ago the great philosopher of our times Mr. Jimmy McMillan said anything and everything I've ever heard from people of my age group (older millennials north of 35...though most of my friends by now do have kids) concerning why they've delayed many major milestones, having kids definitely being one of those:
Maybe the
specific type of American who tended to politically and economically dominate the last quarter of the previous century in the United States -- the white [picket fence], front lawn-fetishizing suburban boomer -- is an endangered species, but I think that has more to do with the passage of time and the fact that many of those same people spent the 1960s through the 1980s doing as many drugs and consuming as many luxury goods as they possibly could (so the declining number of those who are still around are often in poor health and with very strained relationships with their families and modern society in general) all to the neglect of the people who came after them and the planet more generally than "young people aren't having enough children".
tl; dr: Isn't it enough that Millennials, Zoomers, and I suppose some younger Gen Xers (but
especially millennials...
) have supposedly killed everything from the wedding industry to the shopping mall to the misogyny-themed chain restaurant (I'm not putting the boorish and openly sexualized name here on CF, but if you know, you know)? Are 'we' now ushering in the end of the entire society?
Y'know what, actually? Good. I think it's a mighty fine legacy to establish that those of your generation are known to make more conscious choices in life, and if the result is that a smaller number of people who actually
want to be parents and are
prepared to be are the ones having most of the kids for a generation or two, then I don't see how that is bad. Yes, it's going to cause problems vis-a-vis social security and other programs in not too much time, but that time has been coming for decades now (anyone else here old enough to remember the debates about the "lock box"
over 20 years ago?), and the USA really doesn't have much of a social safety net anyway when compared to most of western Europe or most of the rest of the first world, so maybe it'll take us ending the political power of those who could've set
that on a much better path 20+ years ago, too...y'know, when people my age were still teenagers and just as not in charge of anything important as we are now...
But noooooo, we have to step up and have kids or else we might have to make fundamental changes to the country to make it possible to do things that plenty of us see as currently standing in the way of our ability to responsibly have kids! (e.g., get on the much-vaunted 'property ladder'; not get wiped out at the first sign of anything more serious than a paper cut by insane medical debt completely out of whack with what anyone in any other developed country would ever have to pay for anything short of a dang full skeleton transplant, etc.)
Changes that a growing number of us want to make even if we have kids, since everyone I know who has their own in their 30s actually wants their kid(s) to struggle
less than they've had to! Imagine that!
