The REAL Reason No One Wants To Have Kids Anymore

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Let us start with the obvious question.

[00:00:02]Why is nobody having babies anymore? And before you say anything, no, it is not because young people are selfish. No, it is not because they are addicted to their phones. No, it is not because avocado toast destroyed their values. We will not be doing that today. Try somewhere else. Here is what is actually happening. The United States recorded just 3.6 million births in 2025, down from 4.3 million in 2007. That is 700,000 fewer babies every single year than we were producing less than two decades ago. The fertility rate hit a record low of 53.1 per thousand women, down 23% since 2007, 23%. The Congressional Budget Office projects a fertility rate of 1.58 in 2026.

[00:00:45]The replacement rate needed to sustain a population is 2.1. We are at 1.58. We are not replacing ourselves. This is not uniquely American either. South Korea's fertility rate is 0.72, the lowest ever recorded by any country in human history. China, despite ending its one-child policy, cannot get people to have kids, even with cash incentives, government campaigns, and national pleading. Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Australia, Canada, every developed country is watching its birth rate fall, and governments are panicking, offering money, parental leave extensions, and tax breaks. Like the world's most desperate infomercial, "Have a baby. Act now. Limited time offer." And people are still saying no, which means the problem is not motivation. The problem is structural. And the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to say out loud is that the system was not built for families. It was built around them, and there's a very important difference.

[00:01:37]This is the Fiscal Historian, where history explains the present. Subscribe and hit notifications right now. Here is the question for the comments today.

[00:01:45]Have you decided not to have kids or to have fewer than you wanted? And if so, what was the actual reason?

[00:01:51]Drop your honest answer. We read every single one. Let us talk about the number that explains everything. Not the fertility rate, the cost. The USDA estimates the cost of raising a child in America from birth to age 17 is approximately $310,000.

[00:02:07]$310,000 before university. Before the wedding you will eventually subsidize. Before the down payment help they will inevitably need. Before the therapy bills that come from being a teenager in 2026. Just the basics. Food, clothes, health care, child care, school.

[00:02:23]$310,000 per child.

[00:02:27]Now here is where it gets genuinely absurd.

[00:02:30]That $310,000 figure is from 2023 data. Food prices are up 27% since then. Housing costs are up significantly. Health care costs keep rising. The actual number in 2026 is almost certainly higher. Possibly significantly higher. So let us be very generous and keep it at $310,000.

[00:02:50]The median US household income is approximately $80,000 a year. Over 17 years that is $1.36 million in total income. Of which $310,000 goes to one child. That is nearly a quarter of everything you will earn. On one person.

[00:03:04]Who will not pay you back. Who will statistically borrow your car and dent it. Who will call you at midnight for reasons that cannot wait until morning.

[00:03:11]And who, if you're lucky, will visit at Christmas.

[00:03:14]This is the investment case for parenthood in 2026. And we wonder why the pitch is not landing.

[00:03:19]The first uncomfortable truth is child care. And this one is almost too absurd to be real. Almost. The average cost of full-time infant care in the United States is between $15,000 and $40,000 per year. Depending on where you live.

[00:03:32]$40,000 a year to pay someone to look after your baby while you go to work to earn the money to pay the person looking after your baby while you are at work.

[00:03:41]This is not a financial plan. This is a Mobius strip with a mortgage attached.

[00:03:45]In Washington D.C. full-time infant care averages over 40,000 a year. The federal poverty line for a single person is about 15,000. Infant care in DC costs almost three times the federal poverty line for one child for one year. Many families are doing the math and discovering that the second income barely covers child care at all. After transport costs, after work clothing, after convenience food, the net financial gain of two people working versus one staying home with the baby is often close to zero, sometimes negative.

[00:04:14]So, the family has two choices. One parent works and one stays home, which means one income for all expenses, or both parents work and give the difference to the child care provider.

[00:04:24]Neither option results in a comfortable margin for having a second child. And people who cannot comfortably afford one child do not typically rush to have two or three, or the 2.1 that the government's demographic models require.

[00:04:36]The government would very much like you to have 2.1 children. The government has also not addressed child care costs in any meaningful structural way. Make of that what you will.

[00:04:46]The second uncomfortable truth is housing. We have covered this before on this channel, but it is impossible to talk about birth rates without it because you cannot have a baby without somewhere to put the baby unless you are planning to raise them on vibes, which is not recommended.

[00:05:01]The median US home price in early 2026 is approximately $412,000.

[00:05:06]The median household income is approximately $80,000.

[00:05:10]That is a price to income ratio of over five to one. Economists consider three to four times income affordable. We are above that. In major cities, the situation is dramatically worse. In San Francisco, the ratio is above 10 to one.

[00:05:22]In New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, it is similar.

[00:05:26]And here's the thing about babies specifically.

[00:05:28]A baby changes your housing requirements immediately. The one-bedroom apartment that worked for two people no longer works when one of them cannot sleep and needs somewhere to put a crib and makes sounds at 3:00 in the morning that your neighbors would prefer not to hear.

[00:05:41]Moving from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom in most major American cities adds between $500 and $1,000 a month in rent on top of the $310,000 price tag for the child itself, on top of the child care costs that may equal one salary. The housing math for starting a family in 2026 is not difficult. It is impossible. And one in five people globally now expects to not have the number of children they desire, according to the UNFPA's 2025 State of World Population Report. One in five people has already accepted that they will have fewer children than they wanted because the conditions do not allow what they want. That is not a personal choice. That is a structural failure. Wearing the clothes of a personal choice.

[00:06:22]The third uncomfortable truth is what the UNFPA report actually found.

[00:06:25]Released in June 2025 and covering 14 countries, including over a third of the global population. The report's central finding was this. Millions of people are unable to have the number of children they want, but not because they are rejecting parenthood. Economic and social barriers are stopping them. Read that again. Not rejecting parenthood, being stopped. The report found key drivers include the prohibitive cost of parenthood, job insecurity, housing costs, concerns over the state of the world, and the lack of a suitable partner.

[00:06:54]These are not philosophical objections to the concept of children. These are practical barriers to the reality of children. There is a massive difference between I do not want kids because I prefer my freedom and I cannot have kids because I cannot afford the child care, and the housing, and the medical costs, and the job insecurity that makes the whole thing terrifying. Politicians have consistently treated these as the same thing. They are not the same thing. One is a preference, one is a system failing the people inside it. And treating both the same way leads to policies that try to change preferences instead of policies that fix systems, which is why J.D. Vance can suggest taxing childless people. And birth rates continue falling anyway because taxing people for not having children they cannot afford to have is not an economic policy. It is a punishment for being priced out, and punishments do not fix housing markets.

[00:07:45]The fourth uncomfortable truth is student debt, because you cannot talk about why nobody is having kids without talking about the debt they arrive at adulthood carrying.

[00:07:54]Total US student loan debt in 2026 stands at approximately $1.7 trillion.

[00:07:59]$1.7 trillion carried by people who were told "Education is an investment in your future." It is an investment in the sense that it costs money up front and you hope it pays off later. Like all investments, it sometimes does not. The average student loan borrower carries around $37,000 in debt. Many carry significantly more. This debt does not pause while you figure out your life. It accrues interest while you are job hunting. It demands monthly payments while you are paying rent. It follows you to every financial conversation you have, including the conversation about whether you can afford a child. Research consistently shows that student debt delays home purchases, marriage, and family formation, because you cannot save for a house deposit while paying $500 a month in loan repayments, while paying $1,800 a month in rent, while earning $55,000 a year before tax.

[00:08:47]The math is not complicated. It just never adds up to a baby.

[00:08:51]The fifth uncomfortable truth is the partner problem, and this one is less economic and more human. The UNFPA report listed lack of a suitable partner as one of the top barriers to having children.

[00:09:03]This is data confirming something most people already feel.

[00:09:07]Finding someone to have children with has become genuinely harder, not because humans have become worse at relationships, but because the conditions for forming stable relationships have changed dramatically.

[00:09:17]In 2024, single-person households in America hit 38.5 million, 29% of all households living alone. 42% of American adults are unpartnered. 42%. This is the highest proportion in recorded modern history. People are meeting later, if at all. They are marrying later, if at all.

[00:09:35]And since most children are still born to partnered couples, later partnerships naturally mean later, fewer, or no children. The dating landscape has been transformed by apps, which promise to make finding love easier. They did make it easier to find people. They made it significantly harder to commit to one of them when there is theoretically an infinite pool of options.

[00:09:54]Psychologists call this the paradox of choice. The more options available, the harder any single choice becomes. The result is a generation that is more connected and more alone than any that came before it. And you cannot have 2.1 children with someone you have not met yet, or someone you swiped left on because their third photo looked a bit uncertain.

[00:10:13]The sixth uncomfortable truth is the world anxiety factor. And this is the one that governments really do not want to address because they are partially responsible for it. The UNFPA report listed concerns over the state of the world as a top driver of declining birth rates. And the data from 2025 and 2026 backs this up. A significant percentage of young people say they are concerned about bringing children into the current world. Climate change, political instability, economic uncertainty, the sense that things are getting worse, not better, is measurably affecting reproductive decisions.

[00:10:47]Now, here is where it gets interesting because economists and demographers split on this question. Some say declining birth rates are a sign of prosperity. Wealthier, more educated societies have fewer children. That is a consistent global pattern. Others say declining birth rates are a sign of precarity. Economic pressure, housing costs, and downward mobility are forcing people into having fewer children than they want. And here is the genuinely uncomfortable truth. Both are simultaneously true. And they pull in opposite directions, making the policy response almost impossibly difficult because if low birth rates partly reflect better opportunities for women and greater control over reproductive choices, then trying to reverse them through financial incentives may be both effective and slightly coercive simultaneously. But if low birth rates partly reflect people who want children are being structurally prevented from having them, then doing nothing is a genuine policy failure. The government's job is to figure out which is which and target interventions at the structural barriers, not at the people who have simply made different choices. Most governments are not doing that. Most governments are making announcements, offering small tax credits, holding press conferences about being pro-family, and watching the birth rate continue to fall. The announcement is not the policy.

[00:11:59]And in fertility, as in housing, the gap between what is announced and what is done is where the problem lives.

[00:12:06]The seventh uncomfortable truth is what happens if this continues. Because this is not just a personal story about individual choices. This is a civilizational story about what happens to societies that stop replacing themselves. A fertility rate of 1.58 does not feel dramatic. It is not a headline number.

[00:12:22]It does not feel like crisis.

[00:12:24]But compounded over decades, the mathematics are devastating.

[00:12:27]The CBO projects the population age 24 or younger will decline in each of the next 30 years, every year for three decades. Fewer young people. The pension system that was designed for many workers per retiree is approaching a ratio where that math stops working. The tax base that funds the schools, the hospitals, the infrastructure, shrinks as the population ages and the young cohort thins. Japan has been living this future for decades. It has towns that are functionally abandoned, where the average age is approaching 60, where the schools have closed because there are no children, where the local economy has stopped because there are no workers.

[00:13:02]This is not the distant future for countries below replacement rate. It is the trajectory. And the countries that have actually addressed it meaningfully, France, the Nordic countries, some Eastern European nations, did not do it with tax penalties on childless people.

[00:13:17]They did it with universal child care, with generous parental leave policies, with housing support for young families, with health care that does not bankrupt you when the the arrives, with building the actual material conditions that make having children feel survivable rather than financially catastrophic. The countries that did that saw birth rates stabilize, not fully recover to replacement level, but stabilize at a less alarming number. The countries that announced incentive programs and did nothing structural are still watching their rates fall. The lesson is clear.

[00:13:46]It has been clear for decades. People will have children when they can afford to, when they have somewhere safe to bring them home to, when they have support systems that do not crumble under pressure, when they believe the world their child enters is worth entering.

[00:13:58]The birth rate is not a moral failing of any generation. It is a receipt for every housing policy, every wage policy, every child care policy, every student debt policy, every political choice made by every government for the last 30 years.

[00:14:11]The receipt has arrived. 3.6 million babies in 2025, down from 4.3 million in 2007. 700,000 fewer babies every year.

[00:14:20]That is the receipt, and it will keep coming until the conditions that produce it change. Here is the actual uncomfortable truth, the one that the title promised and this video has been building toward.

[00:14:31]People are not giving up on children because they are selfish. They are giving up on children because the system made them.

[00:14:37]The system that could not build enough houses, the system that made child care cost as much as a salary, the system that loaded students with debt before they started, the system that tied health care to employment, the system that let wages fall behind costs for 20 years, the system that then looked at the falling birth rate and said, "What is wrong with young people today?"

[00:14:57]Nothing is wrong with young people today. Something is wrong with the system.

[00:15:01]And the uncomfortable truth is that fixing it requires the people who benefit from the current system to accept costs they have so far successfully avoided. Higher taxes to fund child care and parental leave, zoning reform that allows more housing and lowers prices, student debt reform that stops loading young people before they start, wages that actually track the cost of the life they are supposed to fund. These are not impossible ideas.

[00:15:25]They are not radical ideas. They are ideas that have been implemented in countries with higher birth rates than ours.

[00:15:31]The uncomfortable truth is not about young people, it is about political will and the gap between what politicians say about families and what they actually do to make forming one possible.

[00:15:41]Every civilization that stopped replacing itself eventually declined.

[00:15:44]Not in a single dramatic moment, in the classrooms that got emptier, in the pension systems that got less solvent, in the towns that got quieter until they were not towns anymore. The birth rate is not someone else's problem, it is the problem.

[00:15:57]If this gave you a new perspective, hit subscribe. The Fiscal Historian.