I found this comment and thought this term was a great descriptor for how many people in the US feel ages 20-35. Many are delaying parenthood to meet financial milestones their parents met a decade earlier than them.

Whenever this concept is posted a user will come and add data that shows our buying power is more than it was in the 1960’s. My answer to that is that items from the 1960’s were built to last.

In 1960 you could buy a washing machine and use it until 1985 or longer. If you buy a new washing machine now it might work for 10 years, then it will burn out shortly after the warranty ends. Your purchasing power disappears when you have to purchase the item 3 times in the same timespan.

Budget vehicles now come with bells and whistles no one asked for, and the car only lasts 150,000 miles before a major repair is needed that totals the vehicle. I don’t need heated and cooling seats, fancy touchscreens, or AI in my car. I need something that has good fuel efficiency and lasts 300,000 miles if I keep up with maintenance.

So how much of a role do you all think this plays? Is Enshittification eating the money people could have used on children. If so, how can we fix it?

This guy does a great breakdown of the collapse of fertility in this video and most of the reasons given here. He posits at the end that maybe whatever form it takes and whatever we think is going on is that the reality is that nature itself is exerting pressure on our species reproduction just like every other species. My addition is that when a species' population goes through cycles of boom and bust it is the fittest of the species in a Darwinian sense that endures. If we are left in the end with an Amish majority for example, that means they were the fittest. edit I don't know why the link didn't post, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VQqelrmxpfw

IS Kazakhstan model for giving young families a cheaper home a good example for solving fertility decline ?

Their calculation is that families could have one more child IF housing is cheaper and childcare and medical is nearby and cheap too.

So far it seems to be working.

It that a true working social program , or is there something else working in Kazakhstan that made their fertility rates increase ?

I mean, they are NOT giving cheaper homes to childless people or investment funds. They are specifically giving it to people with children, so that young couples could have an extra child with less effort. So a very smart bet to bet on the actual people who could have more children, if life was more easy !

Not much in the media about this, and even this Yahoo article is slightly confusing. But Kelsey is going to become a father again for the 9th time. He turns 72 in February 2027.

I have nothing against people having kids. If you want a big family, go for it. But this idea that the government should start handing out cash incentives and freebies because birth rates are declining is ridiculous. We can barely keep Social Security financially sustainable, and now we're supposed to throw even more taxpayer money at people for having children? I already pay a ridiculous amount in property taxes to fund public schools, yet we're still dealing with declining reading scores and kids who can barely read at grade level. At what point do we stop pretending that throwing more money at every problem will magically fix it?

I'm not saying children shouldn't exist or that families shouldn't have support systems. I'm saying having kids is a personal choice, not a financial responsibility that should automatically be dumped onto everyone else. Cash incentives aren't free money; somebody has to pay for them. More government spending can mean higher taxes, more debt, or additional inflationary pressure depending on how it's funded. And there's no guarantee these incentives will even meaningfully increase long-term fertility rates. This obsession with government handouts to encourage reproduction feels like commie shit dressed up as economic policy. I thought we believed in personal responsibility, not making taxpayers subsidize every life decision. If declining birth rates are such an economic disaster, maybe we should focus on making the economy better instead of paying people to have babies.

**NOTE - LAB BABIES ARE FINE IN ALLEVIATING PREGNANCY WHICH IS VERY PAINFUL***If we make lab chamber babies who's going to take care of them, couples, single men or women? The overton window went from have babies god is telling you to, have babies your family is telling you to, have babies your country is telling you to, have babies your husband is telling you to, decide whether you want babies or not we don't care we can steal labor from third world countries, please have babies here's money and tax breaks. Women say that if they don't need to give birth they would take care of babies but that's just false. In the 70s women said it was the bad paid time off or workplace discrimination that casued the TFR decrease. Denmark solved that and then some but it didn't do anything. Same thing for Men, 1992-2000 were golden years in the US. The window always evolves, people who lived through wars/famines would galk at our standard of living and wonder why we aren't popping out 30 kids. If lab babies become the norm the issue becomes taking care of a baby is hard, babies are annoying, babies are disgusting, babies are expensive, babies take away from my free time watching content, babies enforce patriarchal standards, men should raise babies. You see the window always evolves for more pleasure, the birth rate has been falling since 1820? If we evolve from that to have a AI humanoid robot take care of the baby soon the robot will take care of the kid all the time so whats the point of even having lab babies for people to create? So they can create some 6'8 blonde SS soldier looking guy and only talk to him 4 times a year? No the TFR crisis has many smaller issues like affordability, housing crisis etc but the main issue is desire. Is there a desire to partner up, adopt or have children, have relationships. If the desire is not there biologically (or not strong enough) and history was mostly just a bunch of oppressor horny men who oppressed women then natalism is dead in the progressive liberal world.

The title and the link basically summarize my question. Before 2003 the TFR of Algeria was in free fall but then it went up until 2020 (after which it started to fall again).

Any clue on what happened during the period?

I think young people are foregoing pregnancy because they want to get high. I didn’t start using it until I already had 3 kids. I would NEVER do that while pregnant. But would I be able to give it up? Doubtful.

As if my circumstantial evidence needed supporting - the circumstantial evidence being so overwhelming to anyone with an active social life with young people in the UK at least - the release of figures of increasing cocaine consumption in the UK make me even more sceptical of the idea people just can't afford kids. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/25/cocaine-linked-crimes-on-the-rise-in-britain-as-consumption-surgesI hate the stuff, but a lot of my friends do it very regularly. And they are doing basic work, like building, cheffing or care work, not earning big bucks, but they can afford at least weekly cocaine binge. On top of buying a load of alcohol to go with it. Sorry, but I don't believe life is so much harder than it's ever been in the past, it's just priorities have changed, and people can't bear to be in relationships any more. And nothing inherently wrong with that, but just be honest about it. They calculate £10 billion per year, and I suspect that's a big underestimate. That's money sniffed up the nose for a half hour buzz rather than putting it away for the future or towards building a family, and it's an amount that would go a long way to pay for enough kids to rectify the fertility rate.