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Anon is married
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Sounds like you asked all of "them". Me included. Or at least a representative sample size, in which case I'd be interested in your methods and the statistics.
People in developed countries with smartphones, unlimited high speed internet and time = no kids (insert variety of reasons here)
Places with no such luxuries (having kids):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fertility-rate/
I would also argue that we have over regulated and are strangling ourselves
admittedly this is oversimplying but ultimately there are more disincentives to having kids than not having kids, and having unlimited entertainment I would argue is part of that
I mean, you could say that for a lot of reasons:
People in developed countries, with access to American-style Pizza = no kids, prove me wrong
If we look at birth rates of developed, industrialized nations, we see the same picture everywhere: a steady downwards trend, with the big chunk happening between the 60s and 90s, so basically, when quality of live became decent and the economy recovered in those countries, post-WW2.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?+title=Fertility_statistics https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/births-australia/latest-release
Counter-point: Zimbabwe is a country with very high mobile phone usage, and really high birth rates. I have no idea about trustworthyness of Zimbabwe sites, but they all seem to agree: https://technomag.co.zw/zimbabwes-mobile-penetration-passes-100/ https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/zim-mobile-phone-usage-climbs-up/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Zimbabwe
However, what is super interesting is the Wikipedia article above: Both births and total fertility go down with child mortality. The obvious conclusion is, if less of your kids die, you don't need to birth so many kids, and interestingly, the less kids you seem to need overall.
So, based on this alone, I believe "high quality of life in strong economy" is much stronger correlated with decreasing birth rates than the invention of the iPhone. I would argue that it is more a case of one not needing that many kids to survive due to improved social and economic situation, and maybe access to education (including sex education of course, less accidents, more family planning).
Sure, entertainment is probably contributing a bit, but I don't see it that far up the list.
Personally, I believe that if you have kids out of boredom, maybe you shouldn't have kids, but idk, get a gym membership or something. How can we say that gifting someone a dog for christmas that may or may not be mistreated and discarded when the novelty weary of is bad, but kids out of boredom is ok?
have you got a gym membership? I do, it doesn't take up that much time but one can go back to the 50s/60s/70's and see what were people doing? At 11pm what were you options for entertainment, I remember in the 90's it was like, read a book, watch TV, or listen to the radio, not exactly thrilling
In comparison now I have an unlimited entertainment vehicle in trolling the fediverse (1.07K Posts/3.04K Comments god damn), I put in ~an hour at the gym every few days, compared to easily hours on the fediverse every week, some nights I put in more time on the fedi than the gym in a month, and that's JUST the fedi, not even mentioning youtube, telegram, mistral/claude, torrents, movies, music, programming, etcetc
I mean I would say it's largely just life, this comes into the overregulation/helicopter parenting, loads of kids would come home from school then just run off for hours until it was time to come home or just for dinner before running off again, parenting shouldn't be a full time job, requiring 24x7 supervision and checking at all times
Ironically because of iphone they now sit inside getting fat watching youtube and tiktok
Like this is the housing we used to live in:
http://romseyaustralia.com/houses.html#7
Now we can't build a house for under a million
We have simultaneously loaded ourselves up with high standards (both with regards to raising kids and the equipment to provide for them) and easy cheap entertainment/calories
It's completely understandable why we're fat and not particularly enthused about raising kids
Man, don't get too hung up on the last sentence, that is more my personal opinion on how one should approach life, I don't expect anyone to share it, I haven't discovered the ultimate truth. Yet. So, my clearly marked personal opinion:
Don't get me wrong, I hate helicopter parenting as much as anyone. "Back in my days", we'd fuck off into the woods after school, doing all kinds of bullshit, and as long as we were home at dinner time and didn't lose any teeth, all was fine. On the other hand, I can't say that that stopped me from becoming a weirdo. I have seen plenty of people have kids who wanted them and really should not have kids, and I have seen some people go above and beyond for their children, although they were in bad situations, or got them by accident and so on.
If one gets a kid out of boredom, I would argue one is exactly the kind of person who parks their kids on youtube in order to watch their own tiktok slop in peace. Or the kind of person who gets a pet and then neglects it. Only that tying up a kid at the highway truck stop is, much to my surprise, still illegal.
Now, to the facts: the data looks pretty clear to me. Higher standard of living, more education, less kids. I don't know why this is really seen as such a bad thing, since apparently, not all people have the inherent drive to have kids, and in a more "developed" society, there is no hard push that one has to have children or else. Not pushing people who don't want to do something is good, in my not very humble opinion.