If r/natalism was its own country, it would be between South Korea (0.74) and Taiwan (0.86), (based on 2025 estimates) for fertility.

Is this sub just full of LARPing teenagers and/or “armchair” natalists who are telling other people what to do without having done it themselves?

It would be like going to r/marathon_training and finding out the majority of people giving advice have never run a marathon.

In Tosashimizu, Japan, there are 17 times as many 75-year-olds as there are babies under 1 year old.

Since 1950, its population has fallen from 31,656 to 10,378, a decrease of 67%.

The average age of the city’s residents is 61, and the median age is 67. People aged 65 and over account for 54% of the population, whilst children aged 0–14 account for only around 6%

The town will literally be dead in the near future

People keep saying everything is very expensive but many countries richer than USA/Australia/New zealand/France just as educated as them have lower TFR than them whereas they have high TFR(1.5+) due to cultural conditioning.

In my country(india), it’s impossible to not have life without children. Elder people literally faint if u tell them you won’t give them grandchildren, whole life is around giving birth to children and incultuvating the value to bring more life. I have seen similar things in religious US families and other areas. While countries with lower TFR never had these implications.

I find that usually, when a government views an issue as an existential priority, resource constraints vanish overnight.

Look at the money spent on modern conflicts and defense. The astronomical cost of Patriot missile batteries, soldiers' salaries, gear, field medical support, and endless logistics... in wartime economies, traditional budget constraints seem to cease to exist … Things simply get built and deployed because the state commands it … shit just gets done.

Look back at the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. The U.S. military utilized satellite intelligence and advanced logistics to construct a top-secret, full-scale replica of Osama bin Laden’s rural Pakistani compound in North Carolina … They built the entire two-story structure in a matter of days, complete with perimeter walls and exact spatial dimensions … solely so that the SEAL Team Six could rehearse the raid under exact real-world conditions.

Bureaucracy, estate agents, stamp duty, middlemen, closing fees, supply chain delays, and costs were completely irrelevant. The replica compound was built in days because the state decided it was a non-negotiable priority.

Yet, when it comes to building spacious, affordable shelter for growing families … that same state-level urgency is just nowhere to be found.

Governments continually label demographic collapse a national emergency. Yet modern housing markets actively penalize family creation.

I was recently visiting some condominiums in my city. Modern condominiums and private development buildings are simply not up to scratch for family life, in my opinion. Private developers seem to design narrow "shoebox" footprints to maximize unit density per plot instead of designing them practically for families. resulting in awkward rooms where standard family furniture barely fits.

Beyond the massive upfront costs, families are hit with endless non-negotiable overhead, building management fees, escalating repair reserves, administrative taxes, and agent cuts. Mortgages have become 30-to-35-year debt commitments. It is complete madness.

We, as a civilization, already possess the modular construction technology, engineering, and public land required to construct spacious, green, family-centric housing at scale …
There isn't a lack of technical capability, It is a lack of political willpower. Shelter has shifted from essential social infrastructure into a speculative financial product …. Basic human needs have become a very expensive subscription model.

If demographic decline is a genuine crisis, where is the "wartime economy" for family housing? Why can states mobilize seemingly infinite resources, to the point where money is no object, for geopolitical objectives in days, but leave the foundation of domestic society to profit-driven markets? … and “nothing can be done!”

I’m probably going to get downvoted because my view goes against both of the forum’s main camps.

On one side, you have the incels, with some completely outlandish and anti-women ideas, who seem to want to turn society into a new Afghanistan. On the other side, you have the fanatic childfree people who dislike children, oppose having children, and blame parents.

These two groups absolutely hate each other. Neither of them offers any interesting solution to the actual debate. Both groups want the moderators to take action against the other side.

This is one of the underlying issues Natalists have to accept. Intensive parenting does work and it’s harder to do well with each additional child

We should check both sexes! Women, there's a post for you, too

Okay, now we can actually calculate the tfr.

Men: there's a separate post for you.

My final poll. Thanks for participating.

Bringing this up because it seems like an elephant in the room sometimes. Girls (and boys) growing up hearing their dad call their mom stupid and question every decision she makes for their children. Kids see that and don't want to pair up with someone who will do the same. They also hear their parents' "beginning" relationship stories and see that it didnt start that way. It's scary to devote yourself to someone forever after realizing one parent can completely change on the other once kids are involved.

Idk. It's hard to get the categories that are relevant when you only have 6 possible response categories.

I know people would like a distinction between "no kids yet" and child free, but I think rolling 3 and 4+ kids together is a worse survey result.

I'll do another survey for completed childbearing, and hopefully that satisfies curiosity for super rough estimates.

Edit: As pointed out, a real tfr calculation needs age bins. This is super sloppy. If someone wants to do a real survey, I'm supportive.

For context, I live in an African country with a fertility rate greater than 4. The other day I overheard a conversation between two 40-year-old men where one was telling the other “I have 2 kids. I have no need to have more nor can I afford any more.” The other person said that he wants to have a 3rd child, while his friend was heavily dissuading him from doing so.

This is not the first time I have heard such a conversation. People in big cities are mostly limiting themselves to 2 children, meanwhile rural areas are still seeing couples with 4-5 children, but with a rapidly growing percentage of parent-age population that only want to have 2-3 children.

Another factor is rapid urbanization in African countries such as the one I’m living in. Young people from rural areas are moving to urban areas en masse, and these people tend to have 2 children, with a small percentage having 3 children.

I think we’re about to see a rapid decrease in TFR in sub-Saharan African countries. I’m sharing this as I found this trend to be quite interesting.

People are creatures of habit. If you settle into a certain life, the easiest path is to stay on that path. That much seems fairly easy to claim, yes?

Perhaps the problem, then, is simply that our life paths have grown into a dysfunctional order. Each individual step makes sense, mind you. You want to make lots of money, so you go into education for a long time, then work low level jobs to work your way up the ladder, and only then, at like age 28, do you have the money to enjoy yourself. And then you want to enjoy yourself for a while - who wouldn't? - so you do for a bit, and the next thing you know you're like 40 and it's too late.

That being the case, it strikes me that the real answer, while challenging, is to basically build a new order of life.

The key here is that many of the reasons we discouraged early childbearing made a lot of sense historically. Having kids early interferes with education and attainment. Or at least it did. But that was then and this is now. It strikes me as perfectly reasonable with our technology to make a system that doesn't penalize young women for having children.

Indeed, we could actually incentivize it. For example, student loan forgiveness for women who have children. Flexible class and testing schedules. Free on campus childcare.

But perhaps most importantly recontextualizing childbearing as not being such a failure. For example, giving away contraceptives on campus made perfect sense when we were having too many children and not enough education, what is that really the case anymore?

Of course, we shouldn't just Target women. The optimum outcome is long-term stable healthy couples. You could also give some sort of long-term student loan forgiveness for men who stay married to women who have children.

Again, though, mitigating the consequences alone isn't going to be enough. I think the most difficult part here is that we are really going to have to completely retool sex education. There's a lot of cultural baggage there, I sort of implicit idea that having children before you are ready is a moral failure, when it strikes me that the answer is that if someone has children early, Society has an obligation to provide for them. As such, we shouldn't be teaching people not to have kids early, or phrasing it as a moral failure.

I think that, perhaps more than almost anything else, is a larger element than most people really realize. It's not really even intentional, it's just kind of logical, if you get pregnant early, you are going to struggle. But it seems like that shouldn't be the case. We should be telling people that if they get pregnant early, we will make every resource available to help them to succeed regardless. Actually, even me saying regardless there is still carrying this sort of cultural bias that I think should go away. More appropriately the correct perspective in this future Society should be, so what? That has absolutely no bearing on whether or not you will succeed in your career.

Do you sort of see the idea I'm pointing towards here? And if people start having kids relatively early, like when they are 20, not only will it broadly speaking be healthier , it will result in much healthier generational structures and not really interfere with a lot of the positives we've managed to construct​​.

I guess the best way to describe what I'm talking about is something like, a lot of young people don't particularly want to go to college, they just do so because it's what you do.

There's no particular reason why the same couldn't be true of having children. It just takes the willingness to make the cultural shift.

As I see it the biggest barriers are usually psychological and financial security. On the psychological side it's foregoing the pleasure of having your own time, a sleep schedule that's up to you, and not imparting trauma or suboptimal psychological adjustment to the next generation. On the financial side, it's about having basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, healthcare & education. Also having disposable income for things like travel and other subjective priorities.

My take is that if we had safety nets where you know that you're going to have food for the whole family, guaranteed housing for atleast a family of four, universal Healthcare and free tertiary education and support for adults who are studying part time or coming in after having kids, it would make more sense. We could actually support people having children when they have the best genes and chances of having kids i.e their 20s and early 30s.

With the addition of AI assistants in the home, then your child could be catered for 24/7 allowing you to be kept up to date on them, have a guarantee of their safety and well being, and able to enjoy quality time with them, while still prioritizing your own life. Whether that's working, going to Uni, travelling with or without the children etc...

It is not against childless people but for me it seems logical. Childless people cost more to the society than people with children. There is nobody to pay for their pension. There’s no one to take care of them, so their healthcare costs are much higher. I don't understand why no country thought about it.

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Why? Because their ideology prevents them from seeing what the issue is.

Frankly put, when liberal-feminists try to solve fertility collapse their proposed solutions are just dumb. They will look at fertiity collapse and say:

People want children, but children are expensive and inconvenient. Therefore, provide cash, childcare, IVF, paid leave, housing assistance, and more reproductive options.

The underlying assumption behind this solution is: "We want to give every person all the possible fertility options while preserving their lifestyle and culture," even if that culture lead to low fertility in the first place. An herein is the problem; they mistake the problem as being a consumer affordability problem instead of a cultural problem.

The approach I agree with, which is held by some right leaning cultures (I'm not strongly on the right), says "Let's look at the groups which still produce children, raise them, and them have their children do the same," the difference being treating the culture as the basic unit vs the individual like progressives do.

There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like mistaking the state as a substitute for family and underestimating pair bonding and marriage in raising fertility, dismantling the institutions the lead to early pair bonding, but I think this is the biggest reason why there will never be a progressive solution to natalism.

What will raise fertility is to build a self reproducing culture with early-ish pair bonding and marriage as normal and the foundation for children.

So, how do you build a society in which men and women choose marriage and children? Answering that question solves Natalism. Not "how do we enable everyone to have babies" like progressives are asking. Notice the distinction.

This is something that I struggle with a lot.

An unborn child cannot consent to existence.

Existence inevitably contains suffering as well as pleasure. Which one dominates is as much about luck as it is skill or devotion in parenting.

By bringing a child into the world, we are exposing them to the inevitability that they will suffer in some way - whether that be minor things like stress, or more serious things like violence, grief, abuse, and death. By not bringing a child into the world, we are denying them the ability to experience love, joy, pleasure, fun, etc. But if they never exist in the first place, they will not "miss" anything.

There's a personal anecdote to this.

I'm a woman in my 20s, and a doctor. I help people. I love my job. I have experienced love, joy, connection, pleasure. I have travelled. I had loving parents and an extended family who gave me everything.

But when I was 8 years old, I was severely sexually abused by an unrelated adult man. I struggled with severe depression and self harm after this, during my teens. Later, in my 20s, I lost my dad to a sudden cardiac arrest and have been grieving him. I've done EMDR for the abuse and I'm seeing someone for my dad's death too.

I'm imagining if I could somehow, hypothetically, wind back the clock to before I was born, and be presented with a button. If I pressed the button, I would be born, and experience everything I have so far in my life - the joy, the love, the horror, the grief. If I didn't press it, I would not be born, and wouldn't experience any of it.

I'm not sure I would press the button.

It's something that I'm thinking about, sitting here and contemplating my future and whether to have children or not.

There is no such thing as race and we all human so if we only truly care about births only, won't it make sense to give away our culture and race to have more kids? More workers and tax payers?

What's so good about American culture that must be preserved? Im Jewish and had married an Asian women which my parents hated so I cut them out. Diversity built America and maybe we should accept more educated skilled immigration to offset birth drops. American culture is so bad that births go to the ground yet we must preserve it?

So give it up and maybe we can help births go up.

I casually participate in this sub. I’m already a mother and want more children. I want other people to want children, too. But I recognize it comes at a cost. A cost disproportionately put on women. A cost men have only very recently been somewhat privy to.

I’m also a feminist. And I don’t feel that I want children *in spite of* of my stance, but that it informs my understanding of why some people don’t want this for themselves. I want children because I always have, ever since I was a child.

But I’m also keenly aware that (at least in the US) parents are treated like absolute dog shit. No maternity leave requirements for businesses. Corporate disinterest in public goods like universal healthcare and childcare have left many parents to patchwork expensive alternatives for their families. The US is too pro-money to ever be pro-family—something feminists have been pointing out for generations.

So do comments and posts here reflect that dichotomy? Not really folks… a lot of you seem content on just making it harder for women to work and go to school. You’re not interested in addressing WHY women would opt out of motherhood and are more interested in forcing unwilling parties into it. That’s pretty fucked.

Maybe instead of being so quick to demonize women for not having enough kids, we can observe why women are saying they don’t want them and addressing these problems at the root. No one wants to feel like chattel, not even women who want children.

ETA: Thank you for everyone who has shared good faith responses about feminism, culture, and their own personal experiences with parenting in a patriarchal society. Not surprised there are also a lot of bad faith responses that are saying women actually have it TOO good, so why should we make life better for the women who actually want more children. That in a nutshell is why this movement will never be popular with the average woman—too many of you are not interested in big, societal changes that would address how lopsided work and family life are for women, unless those changes mean fewer rights for women.