As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share.

First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.

Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.

And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.

Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.

Your experience sounds exactly like mine. My son is very autistic as well. I've had to cut off friends with families because either their didn't understand meltdown and were incredibly judgy because they were blaming my parenting for his ASD meltdowns, or others because my autistic son was a "bad influence". God forbid their (later diagnosed) kid have some exposure to a child with different neurodiversities.

That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.

So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.

Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.

You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.

Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.

And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.

I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record. But once I had my first child, all of those things seemed so petty and inconsequential. I don’t miss the night life, the hobbies, or the drinking buddies. My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation. I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.

$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.

"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"

I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.

So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.

When I read things like this I find it confusing in so many ways. I've been out of the US for a while now so perhaps there's some contemporary issues I'm just not considering? For $6k a month, why not hire a private nanny? You could also work with other parents in your area to setup something for a bit more socializing depending on their age.

Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally every single time we go to e.g. the park. The kids want to play with other kids, we meet their parents, and it's basically an endless source of friendships - even better because it's other parents who probably live relatively close to you enabling you to start setting up aforementioned ideas.

I have plenty of friends with young kids that are super social. They invite people over, take their kids to restaurants and invite people to come, go to picniqs, festivals, and other things. We love their kids (or at least all the people that show up do).

You have the agency to make it happen.

> It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.

Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointless contact.

There's often the expectation that you're super interested and excited about their children. But even if you'd try. You'll never get something back. Not because they turned into bad persons. But because there are just no spare resources for it (e.g. in terms of calendar slots) on their side anymore.

Do I have to be infinitely sympathetic with them? Or is there some limit at which I am allowed to say: This friendship just doesn't give me anything anymore.

> So when one of my kids throws a tantrum

If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.

Not sure how old they are, but we found that this loneliness phase got better once they were in school (and better as they got into middle, then high school.)

> Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.

I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.

I agree, it's the public attitudes that are most disheartening and probably some of the reason young people are less inclined to have children. All over society people are seeing kids as a kind of personal indulgence that shouldn't be allowed to impact other people - whether its a lack of sympathy that parents have higher priorities at work, or looking down on kids who act like kids in public. At the same time parents who let their kids look at screens in public are demonizes, as apparently only kids who are perfectly behaved without distractions should be allowed out.

Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.

> I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare.

My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.

> It's just hard now.

I completely sympathize with the challenges, though I don't understand (and might completely misunderstand) the word "now". Do you meant 'in the current world'? What is different that makes it harder? And what defines now - the social media age? Post-WWII?

> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.

Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.

You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.

It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.

> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.

Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.

We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.

The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC.

Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).

I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.

The “average crime rate” argument is disingenuous for an analogous reason to Waymo reporting that their cars are safer than the average driver is disingenuous: it lumps me in with Doris who last passed her vision test a decade ago but now has two cataracts. It also ignores that crimes in immigrant communities are less likely to be reported in the first place.

It's a band aid. Sure, first gen immigrants may have more children than locals, but then their children are locals, and they follow the local trend.

Kurgezat video on South Korea fertility explains this.

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The dimension of this issue that never gets air time is that we've made having kids almost completely intentional. The richer a country becomes, the more intentional having kids becomes. The dynamic we see with rich countries is that as having kids becomes more intentional, there's also the increase in reasons why people would choose to delay or forego having kids.

There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?

If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.

Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.

However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."

But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.

I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...

> How do you square those facts with your view here?

"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?

Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.

The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory.

Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.

You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.

That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.

Generally, the more developed a country is, the more capitalistic it is. Capitalism inherently assigns monetary value to everything, even children, and as capitalist societies currently function children have deeply negative value. So deeply negative that it completely nullifies the higher “default” standard of quality of life that comes with life in a developed country.

Because it's not just money. It's time and money. You can have lots of money and nice things, but if you don't have time to raise your kids, you can't do it. And if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money.

People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.

Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.

Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!

It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.

Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).

Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either

Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?

Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?

I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.

Or Israel?

It's simply a matter of the social position of mothers, or, what defines the social status of women in a given society. In much of the world it's educational attainment and professional status, so it surprises me very little that most women in these countries don't want children, or can easily find an excuse to not to.

Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.

> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!

Why not ask Israelis?

Even ignoring Haredim and Arab Israelis (both whose fertility rate has fallen dramatically), secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work much longer hours than Americans (South Korea is the only developed OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working) [1], live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms low rise brutalist apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, pay San Francisco level prices for everything, and have almost nonexistent government benefits.

But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.

Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on self-centered.

[0] - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...

[1] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html

Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.

In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.

But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"

Very different things

That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one.

If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.

IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.

And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny. This is a bigger issue than it may seem.

Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.

That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.

> There is an amount of baby cash that would work

Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.

> hire a competent housekeeper/nanny

They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).

More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)

> TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.

Coincidentally, TFR was higher when women had to be paired up with a man and have sex without the use of birth control.

> People already want more kids than they're having

Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.

Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.

And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros.

You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.

> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.

I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.

The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US.

Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...

Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.

Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.

> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.

> And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.

Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.

To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.

So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.

> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty

If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?

> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.

I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.

Funny how you don't realize you fit perfectly into the description of one of the groups that know exactly what is going on.

Analysis from a time before the birth control pill is pointless. It's an alien society.

> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

Easy.

In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor.

Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.

> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.

Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.

You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.

Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.

You really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough.

In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival.

In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.

IMO this is a huge piece of it. People want to have it all, and things are structured where in order to have a decent income, you have to go to college. Then to pay off your loans and make it worthwhile you have to work a number of years. Then you have Madison Avenue telling you you need a fancy car, vacations, etc. You’re told you need to own a house to have a kid. You’re not even to zero by the time you’re 30, the same place prior generations were at 18.

That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.

It was a victory that the teenage pregnancy rates plummeted during the 90's in my small town high school, but when I was there there was still a real drive to discourage kids from having kids, and I internalized the idea that "having children will ruin your life" and carried that with me through my twenties.

That’s also my experience. Specially for women in and my wives close environment.

90% or more wanted to have kids. But the ones that started after 35+ or didn’t have a partner until that age did struggle a lot, and many never managed even after investing 10a of thousands of euros on fertility care.

They prioritized lifestyle and career before family. Then it was too late to have both.

There might be many metrics to measure fulfillment in life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably stick with love. And nothing fills my love cup more than having a large family. YMMV.

you're in a bubble. probably urban, educated and wealthy.

My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.

Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.

A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.

In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.

The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West

Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.

Lord isn't that true...

Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference.

Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...

All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.

'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.

I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.

But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.

I think that perfectly aligns with their take.

People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.

More and more women have the power to choose when they get pregnant every day.

This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.

I think if artificial wombs ever succeed it will turn the world upside down

Not entirely. Sperm counts in young men have been falling for decades. No one is sure why.

> having men who'd make women comfortable having kids

This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.

At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?

> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.

Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.

Israel is a very complex case to say the least...

But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.

Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.

https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...

> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.

>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.

"People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc."

Here is the fertility rate in Bangladesh: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/bgd/ban...