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I'm going to take a general sentiment in a previous thread somewhat further.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that having kids is the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign society has pulled on itself in all of history. Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day. It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling. After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.
I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.
Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down. Likely fuelled by social media as well as other factors, people are finally realizing en masse (though not openly admitting it yet) that it seriously just sucks. Even the welfare queens and third world brown hordes realize that this is true for them too. And they're understandably picking the hedonism option.
And no I don't hate or dislike kids. Kids are great, as long as they're someone else's, and their parents are around to jump in and take care of it as soon as something goes wrong.
I've got 2 under 2 at the moment. I did the first year or so of the first kid's life in stately 'Developed World Nuclear Family' style and then relocated to somewhere with a sprawling multi-generational family structure.
The difference in quality of life between the former and the latter is insane, in terms of how much time you get back, but I think you're vastly overstating exactly how punitive childrearing is at the early stages and how engaging a lot of the creature comforts you were otherwise packing your time with actually were. I feel I'd experienced a sufficiently wide slice of 'the good life' before having kids, between going to 50-odd countries, having a solid dating history, playing sport at a high level and being a reasonably high earner to be able to say most of that is fine but ultimately when/if you experience having kids there's an inherent flip of perspective and drivers.
IMO the main fall-off now is that the rise of birth control & abortion means that increasingly people are having to 'opt in' to having children instead of it just being a constantly present baserate risk of conceiving and then rolling with it.
God do I wish I had this. My side of the family is fully devoted to the "we're empty nesting, figure it out" mindset, and my wife's side has some cultural issues with raising kids (that have given her lasting lifelong issues) that I'd rather not pass along. What's funny to me is that my regret is not in my own dip in quality of life - it's in the kid's. Every time I realize I haven't taken mine out for a proper outing, or have stuck them in front of the TV (to my credit, in front of properly vetted age appropriate material for a limited time) I have a huge pang of guilt for not having a proper and engaging village for them to experience. It used to be that having that was the norm. Even as the nuclear family developed, the baby boom was in full swing, and full neighborhoods of children would be able to play and parents could easily organize (or fall into) play dates to lighten the load and develop their children's social minds. Each generation has been a poor recursion of this structure, but with the baby boom, fewer people having kids in more spread out places means the full neighborhoods of kids just don't exist on any sort of scale anymore.
If anything, I would say this is the biggest practical limit to having kids today, though I think some other factors are at play when it comes to the actual decision-making (shameless plug).
Yeah I was raised in the developed West and was barely exposed to aunts/uncles/cousins due to a combination of my parents moving away and fighting some crab bucket tendencies in the wider family. My kids can now go downstairs and run into a ridiculous amount of cousins and neighbors inside the same gated community, which I hope can serve to ameliorate spectrum behaviors and tendencies on the part of my genetic material.
Back when I was in Australia for the first year or so, a combination of being the only person in my early-thirties yuppie friend group to reproduce and my own parents bailing to be closer to the ocean meant that there wasn't really a social layer. The government parenting group programs were well-meaning, but even then tended to have weird hodge podge cultural mixes of like... 18 year old headscarf-wearing recent immigrants and mid-late thirties upper middle class neurotics in my area. With nothing in between. Plus even if my friend group was particularly fecund the geographic reality of home-ownership in the city I lived in essentially forced people to buy an hour and a half away from the CBD in farflung locales so unless you happened to land on the same compass-point as your social group you were fucked.
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