The cost of living is too high. Having children is really expensive and you have to worry about whether they'll make it as adults or whether things will be even worse then

Only get pregnant if you can afford it.

OK

No, not like that

Countries are just arbitrary pieces of land and cannot produce offspring. 😌

Here in Northern Sweden the preschools in the cities are all closing down due to lack of kids. We have the opposite problem in the villages. Long waiting lists and shortages. Our municipality, population 5000, has 6 existing preschools and just built a new one. City housing costs more than 3 times as much as the villages and small towns. Families can't afford housing in the city. It's all rich retired people in the larger houses and young single people in tiny apartments.

Feminism/Equality and the changes it has brought.

This isn't a bad thing, which is important to get out early because some far-right groups use it as an example for why we should wind back the clock.

Most women in advanced countries work, they have and want to have meaningful careers. Having children conflicts with that, in the immediate significant time off, and the long term impact of being the default parent when they have issues at school or are sick.

Lifestyles in advanced countries really rely on two incomes. Stopping work for a significant period to raise multiple children is a significant impact on that income, plus the long term expenses of the child combine to reduce that lifestyle. Not having children, or reducing the number, can be an economic choice.

The culture of both parents working also impacts the support network. Your working, your friends are working, the village is behind a desk not supporting you.

Finally women get a choice now, which is a change that is recent, isn't global and doesn't seem to be as widely acknowledged as it should be.

Society needs to change to address these issues and provide these missing supports. Which is going to take time, but as they are addressed we will probably see the birth rates start to climb again.

I can't prove it but I suspect that they are having about as many children as they want and our expectations of 'fertility rates' are actually skewed by the number of unwanted pregnancies that were forced on people who then existed in the space of 'We didn't ask for this but now we love the little shit so I guess we'll make the best of it.' The world is and has been changing so fast for the last century or so that our sense of long term trends is much harder to understand.

Other activities outcompete children.

The other points like difficulty and money are valid but I think primarily kids are just not worth it for many and they'd rather travel or just have their own time which imo should be a perfectly acceptable take.

That's for the first child but once you got one the barrier for more is almost always finance or pregnancy difficulties. Kids don't scale as well as they used to.

Education time and income instability. People are well into their 30s before they know where to settle down after finishing an education. They're well into their 40s before they can afford to.

If any country wanted to increase childbirth rates, they ought to lower working time, increase education pay and move employment out of the central cities.

Or put simply: Money and time needs to be available for the people they want to reproduce.

Now, I just saw the latest Kurzgesagt episode on this, and there's one thing they missed: Automation. We don't necessarily need to keep a stable or increasing population if only we can automate a lot more labour. In my opinion it's the only solution to avoid the future population crisis.

Late stage capitalism.
Having kids is really expensive and insane amount of responsibility. Childcare is a full time job - so you need to go one worker per family, or be able to afford paying for it.

Anecdotally, I’d say money and the world would be the two big things.

People don’t have enough money to raise kids. Americans can’t afford to give birth with hospital bills. Childcare is expensive, but the alternative is no income. People can’t accumulate generational wealth, so there’s nothing to pass on, therefore no need for anyone to pass it to.

Environmental anxiety is real. Why bring kids into a world that’s about to burn?

Maybe one last factor is rebellion. A small sample I feel like chooses not to have kids so as not to perpetuate the system. The billionaires can’t exploit my kids if I don’t have any.

Online, parents are candid about how crappy parenting is.

We can see this and learn from it.

Multiple times, I have seen parents sympathizing with other parents who have such an overwhelming urge to shake their baby that they have to abandon the kid and go to another room.

capitalism

1. Income increase.
2. Fear
3. See #2

Because landmasses don't have reproductive organs with which to procreate.

Countries can't have children, they're not alive.

Have you seen how the world is doing?

Here are my reasons:

• We are already starting to feel the effects of global warming, it will only get worse and people don't take it serious. Why should Ibput another soul into this world just to suffer from the stupidity of others?
• Child care is super expensive and quality isn't great and being a stay at home parent isn't really an option if you want too keep up in the work market place.
• Why should I have a kid, if I'm not gonna spend time with them? I mean to feed them & offer them all the anemities, me and my partner would need to work full-time, so when are we gonna spend time with our kid?
• edit see bellow why.
• I like my freedoms.
• The schooling system is shit. Why should I raise kids in a society that starts the "grind" at age 5 and keeps you going until you are 65?
• etc.

I'm not in most countries

I personally think it is that western culture is a disease. We have lost our connection to nature. We don't have a community. We don't have a family. We are exceedingly living in Ayn Rands dystopian individualist bullshit and it is corrupting on the soul.