"Bitter and hostile men trying to take down anyone who's capable of normal interaction with women. "No I don't recognise myself there. Within any debating chamber there's been a stereotype of someone who's so eager for allies they effectively keep saying "I agree with everything he/she says ".While it shouldn't hardly be necessary to restate how alluring attractive AND smart young women can be for most guys....
Okay, but John Arcto literally agrees with almost no one and if fact is almost always vehemently disagreeing with everyone, lol. This is a single time he's actually giving props to someone and I'm sure it is not because Daniella is a pretty girl, that's insulting to both of them.
I've yet to see any of these pro-natalists explain *why* exactly it is so important for humanity to reproduce. If they're not religious or ethnonationalist, what reason do they have for being so concerned about the future of peoples? For one, there are metaphysical reasons, for the other, racial preservation. For secularist types, I wonder: why do you care about a future you won't be alive to see?
I don't take any of their complaints seriously until they can answer that first question: why is it so important?
The main concern I see them pose is economic collapse and a growing aging population with no one to take care of them in an effective manner. A serious problem no doubt, but perhaps an inevitable climax to seeing better skies.
Dependency ratio death spiraling is a big concern, but I think there is also a sense that low TFR reflects human desires unfulfilled.
People say they want 2.5 kids and end up with 1.5 kids (or less). You can call that revealed preference, but ending up a fenatyl addict is a revealed preference too. Not all revealed preferences are equal.
It seems to me there are a lot of ways well within our societal ability to make it easier to have kids, and this might close the gap between stated and revealed preferences. Given the large positive externalities to society, this seems like a win win.
As far as I can tell the only arguments against are short termism (does not boost gdp in the short term or get anyone elected) and a kind of resentment on behalf of the childless (I’m not paying to help raise someone else’s children! Though of course I will let someone else’s children pay for my retirement in 30 years).
-Rapid pop decline will cause economic collapse which will cause a lot of suffering, destabilization. Countries will end up like Japan or Greece. Pension funds going down, infrastructure collapse. Kids used to be your pension fund basically. And we've just abstracted that. If you're younger than 80 it's still a concern.
--The world economy is also interconnected. The collapse of say Korea, China or Europe will affect us.
-We want to get to space, you need a lot of intelligent people. Why have one Elon when you can have 10+
-Only the religious would reproduce making society just them. Liberals would like a secular future.
Race preservation isn't an issue it's actually east asians and native americans most at risk.
100% this. The only reason I've seen given is that it will be economically difficult to navigate population shrinkage. That's not a good enough reason to continue farming humans at historically-recent levels.
Is the problem also the amount of children had by those who do have them? Having only 1 which is an actual decrease in population over time. I think 2 and for women who really loves kids 3 would be nice for some, but 1 is an issue if it is a choice, mainly because it creates lonely only child syndrome. I understand getting to 4 or more unless in a rural area and perfect circumstances for it. Daniella you were an Only child, and how did that affect you? I would just prefer as many could get to 2 or 3 kids once they have them. I guess it depends on how difficult the pregnancy was and the age of the mother when having her 1rst.
2.1 is the replacement rate. If we address the societal and economic challenges posed against family creation, I do believe that most couples will prefer to have more than one child anyway. I think we need to incentivize families to have 2-3, and maintain a policy requiring one parent to stay home if you decide to have more than 3. (Having good quality children requires consistent care, management, and attention. It should be an option for wealthier families as well. How to implement this policy is not something I have fully considered yet.) For couples who do prefer only one (especially those marrying later in life) should have the option of one. I would actually suggest older couples to leave it to just one.
To answer your more personal question, I loved being an only child. I did not grow up lonely, and I preferred being the only child when I was asked if I wanted a sibling. I understand I may be the exception in this case. It personally affected me positively, however. I concede this perhaps paints some of my considerations on the topic, but I do believe having less children (and only wanted children) allows for better quality people.
>Having good quality children requires consistent care, management, and attention.
That depends on your definition of "good quality" because an argument that Bryan Caplan would make is that, serious mistreatment aside, kids turn out pretty similarly in overall life outcomes regardless of intensity of parenting — with their genetics being the largest determinant of the life outcomes you can expect. I have a younger brother, and I've never had the thought that I'd prefer to be an only child. In fact, whenever I'm talking with people about number of children, I will actually bring up how I think it is borderline cruel to have only one kid (most of the time). It's also worth noting that my parents have had to adjust their parenting to each of us since we're just very different people.
Now some people, probably including you seeing as you're a substacker, are highly individualistic and end up preferring an arrangement where they can soak up all the "resources" put before them by their parents. But in my case my brother gave me practice in parenting (since I felt compelled to discipline him at times), called me out on my bullshit, moderated arguments between our parents and me, emotionally tied me to the plight of those who are intelligent/thoughtful but crushed by "education" today, and expanded by friend pool by welcoming me into his spaces (which I reciprocate). I'm sure I missed some things, but the only thought that I've had as to siblings in an alternate world is what it would be like having more siblings.
I'm now set on having at least 5 kids because I know it'll be challenging and, hence, rewarding while also virtually assuring my kids a dynamic and supportive upbringing. I'll also heavily encourage all of them to have many kids and start relatively early, which should be an easy sell as long as I build a home that they are happy to have been raised in. Plus, with the low fertility all around me, this gives me an opportunity to put my genes out there in a few combinations to hopefully affect the future since, again, people's genetic have a strong bearing on their outcomes and proclivities.
Of course young people can see the advantages of being an only child the basic instinct of there's more for me..resources, parental attention when demanded or their parents ability to purchase paid help etc. A recent survey showed Lithuania as having the happiest under 25s, hardly a coincidence given that the nation's post Soviet Union birth rate collapse is entering its second generation and mass emigration had already shrunk its population by a record level outside of times of war and/or famine. Low rent and plenty of well paid job opportunities were two of the reasons quoted.
If you haven't heard of it before, you may want to check out the birthgap documentary. It speaks to how much of the trend of lowering TFRs is due to women postponing having children, which ends up foreclosing children for many who wait too long and reducing the number of children had by those who start in time because the window still closes eventually. Basically there is a gap between desired fertility and observed fertility.
Higher [and lower] education is a societal poison. The whole system is at best an inefficient way to give citizens a rudimentary education and at worst actively harmful. The whole system needs to be torn down.
>Higher education degrees are considered requisite for a comfortable lifestyle; this needs to be eradicated as an idea and as a truth in the professional world.
A first, practical step, to solving the low TFR problem is devorcing ourselves from the idea that everyone, especially women, is universally capable of attaining higher education degrees.<
Refreshing to see someone make this very obvious observation. Universities are largely obsolete in a post-Internet world. We also need to find a way back to a world in which an advanced degree is not viewed as necessary to support a family.
Yes, I believe this is a primary cause: the dilution of the college degree. Thank you for the good words! I also want to make clear that I do not believe higher education is entirely obsolete or useless - simply that it is an institution and disciple that is not meant for everyone; only the right path for a minority of the population.
There's an incredibly large elephant in the room here. Women have being achieving higher educational outcomes than men for quite a few years by now. The obvious reason is earlier maturation plus the societal drive to elevate their status vis a vis men. School cirricula and testing have been designed to favour their strengths over any perceived male strong points eg the UK minimised Geometry in mathematics as much as possible as there was consistently clear evidence that boys outscored girls in that discipline. While the obvious bias that a majority female teacher cohort will have shouldn't even be questioned. Then anti sex discrimination laws which are in force in every section of the western world inevitably end up discriminating against males. While the anti race discrimination legislation will affect the (still )majority white male section of the population far more than the white female group. With equal pay legislation now decades old there's now a drive for the elimination of the "gender pay gap " .If this was really put under the microscope it would actually show that its precisely the opposite dynamic that's occurring across the jobs market. Even setting aside the prefential hiring that women tend to get in the first place any direct comparison between a male and female working in the same post would show that on average women consistently get paid more than men. Taking more sick leave,discretionary paid leave etc. Now in any situation where two males were doing the same job if one was putting in even 2 %less graft than the other one and still getting the same wage there would be a reaction for certain. But it won't/can't happen in a direct male/female binary because of the weight of legislation behind the female and of course good old fashioned chivalry!If a gay male employee saw himself being disadvantaged by a female he would certainly be likely to make his displeasure known. Stripping out the legislation creating a female bias and the heterosexual male desire to seek female approval in a workplace setting would be a societal earthquake and have the potential for a reset .But it will never happen of course because those two dynamics mentioned along with the anti white racism that elite white women are fine with are the stumbling blocks.
I don't know if he is "harping on the emotional heartstrings" -- his language is fairly mild all things considered.
But "terminating a pregnancy" is quite a clinical euphemism for a very grave, very traumatic thing -- to put it very mildly.
Beyond that, there is a point about universities, the tenure-clock, and academia in general not being conducive to having kids - but none of it is prohibitive. The temporary positions tend to pay very poorly anyway, and so are of little loss. Tenure-track women are often granted long maternity leave, and spousal hires are very, very common -- i.e., if the male brainiac lands a job, there's a good chance his female brainiac wife will be given a job too, before or after maternity leave, and vice versa (if she gets a job and gets pregnant, he'll likely have been given a job as well in the same university). The situation isn't as dismal as it is made out to be.
Just to touch on the contraceptive bit, getting pregnant used to be something that often just happened as a matter of course. It wasn't -- and does not have to be -- meticulously planned our and prepared for. Lots of people are "happy accidents" that were bundles of joy after being born nonetheless. That's not a bad thing.
I also will bump Person Online's response to this. Pregnancy is highly disruptive and it should be an option for a woman to terminate it if she so chooses. I personally believe the window should be an allowance for up to 7-8 weeks.
If we resolve the cultural issue of valuing careerism more than home-making fo both sexes (men should also get into trade more) and implement it as an academic course for the youth, directed as a pathway in early education, we do not even have to address the higher education problem.
It is true that higher-IQ people, men and women, and higher-IQ couples, will have fewer kids or no kids at all. That is okay, and a natural byproduct of high-IQ and higher-neuroticism individuals. I am not of the assertion that we should only breed high-IQ citizens; simply that we maintain good quality genetic output in the already pre-existing working class heritage Americans by incentivizing them to opt out of higher education careerism.
Pregnancy is a natural thing that happens when people have sex--birds & bees & all that. Up until very recently in human history, there wasn't birth control. Young people still had sex, and naturally they would often end up pregnant. It's a natural event that is quite necessary.
Compare: getting into a serious car wreck, falling off a roof, and any other number of serious injuries are actual disruptions. Unplanned, unnecessary, and debilitating--sometimes permanently. These injuries are disruptive to live itself.
Pregnancy is a *necessary* part of life for humanity, not necessarily for an individual, but for the species yes. It will put a "career" on hold, yes (though, per my latest article and exploration of old dictionaries, a "career" originally meant a course of action -- no mention of profession or employment -- and so starting a family was and is very much a career) but life does not boil down to one's job.
Not inclined to dive into the IQ stuff here (I'm not sure how relevant it is, exactly, and think any observable correlations are much more pronounced post 1960s), but per men and women, homemaking, careers, etc: there is a distinction between *who* one is and *what* one is. There is a great deal of wiggle-room with the who, a great deal less with the what.
I once was discussing a book project on fatherhood that a friend of a friend was interesting in publishing with my publishing house. In the discussion, I discovered that part of the book was about "equalizing" the responsibilities between father and mother, i.e., erasing the distinction between the two. I asked him whose job it was to address a home intruder in the middle of the night. His response: "She knows where the gun is!" The conversation ended right there.
Women aren't made for fighting--men are. When an infant or small child is crying, he or she doesn't want Dad--they want Mom. Men have a much higher capacity for workplace endurance and physical/professional projects than women, while women genuinely enjoy child-rearing in a way men do not. Moreover, women can put love into a home--men can't do that, it's impossible for us. A bachelor pad can be set up very utilitarian: kitchen shit over here, entertainment over there, camping/gardening/auto shit over there, etc. But there's no love in a bachelor pad, ever. Living with a woman, suddenly the home is transformed into a home -- that's part of what makes women so lovely.
Phenomenologically speaking, these are important things to consider.
Pregnancy is difficult and disruptive for many women, so it makes absolute sense to plan for it. There is no reason this planning needs to take all the way until the woman is nearly infertile, though. Our society has managed to get this priority completely backwards. In the proper state of things, women would plan their lives first around having children and establishing a stable family; and only after that was done would they bother with a "career," if they felt like it.
I don't think the low birth rates are a problem. Whom is it a problem to? To economists? To big companies who need a large and cheap labor pool and a large consumer market? To pensioners who need us to continue contributing to have their pensions? To ethnonationalists who want to maintain a majority "native" or "white" in their countries? I'm none of those and all of these causes either do not resonate with me or don't make sense at all.
Even if I did think this was a problem , I don't think there is a solution to this problem, it is the future, it is inevitable. That being the case, however, in the worst case scenario it is a problem that will self-correct.
My maternal grandmother was a school teacher, she had 5 children, my mother is an engineer and was a public servant for 40 years she had 2 kids me and my brother. We are already 2 generations deep successfully having kids with both parents working full time, and soon, hopefully me and my fiancée, which also works full time as a public servant (she is an architect) will follow along.
My point is: there are no excuses, if you need the government to hand you incentives to have kids, you already lost, you are *weak*. If you are scared to have kids for economic reasons you are self-selecting your genes out of the gene pool, and maybe that is not such a bad thing after all, that is what I meant when I said this might be a self-correcting problem.
Another great article Daniella. Keep up the good work!
Wow!Who'd have thought that substack could be the new intellectual simp zone..
Who would've thought it'd be the new place for bitter and hostile men to try to take down anyone capable of normal interaction with women?
"Bitter and hostile men trying to take down anyone who's capable of normal interaction with women. "No I don't recognise myself there. Within any debating chamber there's been a stereotype of someone who's so eager for allies they effectively keep saying "I agree with everything he/she says ".While it shouldn't hardly be necessary to restate how alluring attractive AND smart young women can be for most guys....
Okay, but John Arcto literally agrees with almost no one and if fact is almost always vehemently disagreeing with everyone, lol. This is a single time he's actually giving props to someone and I'm sure it is not because Daniella is a pretty girl, that's insulting to both of them.
The tyranny of beauty...
A minor compliment =/= simping.
No!Definitely not just a minor compliment. A whole hearted endorsement of everything that you wrote to be more precise....
I've yet to see any of these pro-natalists explain *why* exactly it is so important for humanity to reproduce. If they're not religious or ethnonationalist, what reason do they have for being so concerned about the future of peoples? For one, there are metaphysical reasons, for the other, racial preservation. For secularist types, I wonder: why do you care about a future you won't be alive to see?
I don't take any of their complaints seriously until they can answer that first question: why is it so important?
The main concern I see them pose is economic collapse and a growing aging population with no one to take care of them in an effective manner. A serious problem no doubt, but perhaps an inevitable climax to seeing better skies.
Dependency ratio death spiraling is a big concern, but I think there is also a sense that low TFR reflects human desires unfulfilled.
People say they want 2.5 kids and end up with 1.5 kids (or less). You can call that revealed preference, but ending up a fenatyl addict is a revealed preference too. Not all revealed preferences are equal.
It seems to me there are a lot of ways well within our societal ability to make it easier to have kids, and this might close the gap between stated and revealed preferences. Given the large positive externalities to society, this seems like a win win.
As far as I can tell the only arguments against are short termism (does not boost gdp in the short term or get anyone elected) and a kind of resentment on behalf of the childless (I’m not paying to help raise someone else’s children! Though of course I will let someone else’s children pay for my retirement in 30 years).
There's some arguments they make:
-Rapid pop decline will cause economic collapse which will cause a lot of suffering, destabilization. Countries will end up like Japan or Greece. Pension funds going down, infrastructure collapse. Kids used to be your pension fund basically. And we've just abstracted that. If you're younger than 80 it's still a concern.
--The world economy is also interconnected. The collapse of say Korea, China or Europe will affect us.
-We want to get to space, you need a lot of intelligent people. Why have one Elon when you can have 10+
-Only the religious would reproduce making society just them. Liberals would like a secular future.
Race preservation isn't an issue it's actually east asians and native americans most at risk.
You've conflated citizenship/residency with ethnicity within European countries" populations .
100% this. The only reason I've seen given is that it will be economically difficult to navigate population shrinkage. That's not a good enough reason to continue farming humans at historically-recent levels.
You've answered your own question.
Is the problem also the amount of children had by those who do have them? Having only 1 which is an actual decrease in population over time. I think 2 and for women who really loves kids 3 would be nice for some, but 1 is an issue if it is a choice, mainly because it creates lonely only child syndrome. I understand getting to 4 or more unless in a rural area and perfect circumstances for it. Daniella you were an Only child, and how did that affect you? I would just prefer as many could get to 2 or 3 kids once they have them. I guess it depends on how difficult the pregnancy was and the age of the mother when having her 1rst.
2.1 is the replacement rate. If we address the societal and economic challenges posed against family creation, I do believe that most couples will prefer to have more than one child anyway. I think we need to incentivize families to have 2-3, and maintain a policy requiring one parent to stay home if you decide to have more than 3. (Having good quality children requires consistent care, management, and attention. It should be an option for wealthier families as well. How to implement this policy is not something I have fully considered yet.) For couples who do prefer only one (especially those marrying later in life) should have the option of one. I would actually suggest older couples to leave it to just one.
To answer your more personal question, I loved being an only child. I did not grow up lonely, and I preferred being the only child when I was asked if I wanted a sibling. I understand I may be the exception in this case. It personally affected me positively, however. I concede this perhaps paints some of my considerations on the topic, but I do believe having less children (and only wanted children) allows for better quality people.
>Having good quality children requires consistent care, management, and attention.
That depends on your definition of "good quality" because an argument that Bryan Caplan would make is that, serious mistreatment aside, kids turn out pretty similarly in overall life outcomes regardless of intensity of parenting — with their genetics being the largest determinant of the life outcomes you can expect. I have a younger brother, and I've never had the thought that I'd prefer to be an only child. In fact, whenever I'm talking with people about number of children, I will actually bring up how I think it is borderline cruel to have only one kid (most of the time). It's also worth noting that my parents have had to adjust their parenting to each of us since we're just very different people.
Now some people, probably including you seeing as you're a substacker, are highly individualistic and end up preferring an arrangement where they can soak up all the "resources" put before them by their parents. But in my case my brother gave me practice in parenting (since I felt compelled to discipline him at times), called me out on my bullshit, moderated arguments between our parents and me, emotionally tied me to the plight of those who are intelligent/thoughtful but crushed by "education" today, and expanded by friend pool by welcoming me into his spaces (which I reciprocate). I'm sure I missed some things, but the only thought that I've had as to siblings in an alternate world is what it would be like having more siblings.
I'm now set on having at least 5 kids because I know it'll be challenging and, hence, rewarding while also virtually assuring my kids a dynamic and supportive upbringing. I'll also heavily encourage all of them to have many kids and start relatively early, which should be an easy sell as long as I build a home that they are happy to have been raised in. Plus, with the low fertility all around me, this gives me an opportunity to put my genes out there in a few combinations to hopefully affect the future since, again, people's genetic have a strong bearing on their outcomes and proclivities.
Of course young people can see the advantages of being an only child the basic instinct of there's more for me..resources, parental attention when demanded or their parents ability to purchase paid help etc. A recent survey showed Lithuania as having the happiest under 25s, hardly a coincidence given that the nation's post Soviet Union birth rate collapse is entering its second generation and mass emigration had already shrunk its population by a record level outside of times of war and/or famine. Low rent and plenty of well paid job opportunities were two of the reasons quoted.
If you haven't heard of it before, you may want to check out the birthgap documentary. It speaks to how much of the trend of lowering TFRs is due to women postponing having children, which ends up foreclosing children for many who wait too long and reducing the number of children had by those who start in time because the window still closes eventually. Basically there is a gap between desired fertility and observed fertility.
Higher [and lower] education is a societal poison. The whole system is at best an inefficient way to give citizens a rudimentary education and at worst actively harmful. The whole system needs to be torn down.
Completely agree, the system is systemic in all matters
>Higher education degrees are considered requisite for a comfortable lifestyle; this needs to be eradicated as an idea and as a truth in the professional world.
A first, practical step, to solving the low TFR problem is devorcing ourselves from the idea that everyone, especially women, is universally capable of attaining higher education degrees.<
Refreshing to see someone make this very obvious observation. Universities are largely obsolete in a post-Internet world. We also need to find a way back to a world in which an advanced degree is not viewed as necessary to support a family.
Yes, I believe this is a primary cause: the dilution of the college degree. Thank you for the good words! I also want to make clear that I do not believe higher education is entirely obsolete or useless - simply that it is an institution and disciple that is not meant for everyone; only the right path for a minority of the population.
There's an incredibly large elephant in the room here. Women have being achieving higher educational outcomes than men for quite a few years by now. The obvious reason is earlier maturation plus the societal drive to elevate their status vis a vis men. School cirricula and testing have been designed to favour their strengths over any perceived male strong points eg the UK minimised Geometry in mathematics as much as possible as there was consistently clear evidence that boys outscored girls in that discipline. While the obvious bias that a majority female teacher cohort will have shouldn't even be questioned. Then anti sex discrimination laws which are in force in every section of the western world inevitably end up discriminating against males. While the anti race discrimination legislation will affect the (still )majority white male section of the population far more than the white female group. With equal pay legislation now decades old there's now a drive for the elimination of the "gender pay gap " .If this was really put under the microscope it would actually show that its precisely the opposite dynamic that's occurring across the jobs market. Even setting aside the prefential hiring that women tend to get in the first place any direct comparison between a male and female working in the same post would show that on average women consistently get paid more than men. Taking more sick leave,discretionary paid leave etc. Now in any situation where two males were doing the same job if one was putting in even 2 %less graft than the other one and still getting the same wage there would be a reaction for certain. But it won't/can't happen in a direct male/female binary because of the weight of legislation behind the female and of course good old fashioned chivalry!If a gay male employee saw himself being disadvantaged by a female he would certainly be likely to make his displeasure known. Stripping out the legislation creating a female bias and the heterosexual male desire to seek female approval in a workplace setting would be a societal earthquake and have the potential for a reset .But it will never happen of course because those two dynamics mentioned along with the anti white racism that elite white women are fine with are the stumbling blocks.
I don't know if he is "harping on the emotional heartstrings" -- his language is fairly mild all things considered.
But "terminating a pregnancy" is quite a clinical euphemism for a very grave, very traumatic thing -- to put it very mildly.
Beyond that, there is a point about universities, the tenure-clock, and academia in general not being conducive to having kids - but none of it is prohibitive. The temporary positions tend to pay very poorly anyway, and so are of little loss. Tenure-track women are often granted long maternity leave, and spousal hires are very, very common -- i.e., if the male brainiac lands a job, there's a good chance his female brainiac wife will be given a job too, before or after maternity leave, and vice versa (if she gets a job and gets pregnant, he'll likely have been given a job as well in the same university). The situation isn't as dismal as it is made out to be.
Just to touch on the contraceptive bit, getting pregnant used to be something that often just happened as a matter of course. It wasn't -- and does not have to be -- meticulously planned our and prepared for. Lots of people are "happy accidents" that were bundles of joy after being born nonetheless. That's not a bad thing.
I also will bump Person Online's response to this. Pregnancy is highly disruptive and it should be an option for a woman to terminate it if she so chooses. I personally believe the window should be an allowance for up to 7-8 weeks.
If we resolve the cultural issue of valuing careerism more than home-making fo both sexes (men should also get into trade more) and implement it as an academic course for the youth, directed as a pathway in early education, we do not even have to address the higher education problem.
It is true that higher-IQ people, men and women, and higher-IQ couples, will have fewer kids or no kids at all. That is okay, and a natural byproduct of high-IQ and higher-neuroticism individuals. I am not of the assertion that we should only breed high-IQ citizens; simply that we maintain good quality genetic output in the already pre-existing working class heritage Americans by incentivizing them to opt out of higher education careerism.
What is the nature of this "disruption"?
Pregnancy is a natural thing that happens when people have sex--birds & bees & all that. Up until very recently in human history, there wasn't birth control. Young people still had sex, and naturally they would often end up pregnant. It's a natural event that is quite necessary.
Compare: getting into a serious car wreck, falling off a roof, and any other number of serious injuries are actual disruptions. Unplanned, unnecessary, and debilitating--sometimes permanently. These injuries are disruptive to live itself.
Pregnancy is a *necessary* part of life for humanity, not necessarily for an individual, but for the species yes. It will put a "career" on hold, yes (though, per my latest article and exploration of old dictionaries, a "career" originally meant a course of action -- no mention of profession or employment -- and so starting a family was and is very much a career) but life does not boil down to one's job.
Not inclined to dive into the IQ stuff here (I'm not sure how relevant it is, exactly, and think any observable correlations are much more pronounced post 1960s), but per men and women, homemaking, careers, etc: there is a distinction between *who* one is and *what* one is. There is a great deal of wiggle-room with the who, a great deal less with the what.
I once was discussing a book project on fatherhood that a friend of a friend was interesting in publishing with my publishing house. In the discussion, I discovered that part of the book was about "equalizing" the responsibilities between father and mother, i.e., erasing the distinction between the two. I asked him whose job it was to address a home intruder in the middle of the night. His response: "She knows where the gun is!" The conversation ended right there.
Women aren't made for fighting--men are. When an infant or small child is crying, he or she doesn't want Dad--they want Mom. Men have a much higher capacity for workplace endurance and physical/professional projects than women, while women genuinely enjoy child-rearing in a way men do not. Moreover, women can put love into a home--men can't do that, it's impossible for us. A bachelor pad can be set up very utilitarian: kitchen shit over here, entertainment over there, camping/gardening/auto shit over there, etc. But there's no love in a bachelor pad, ever. Living with a woman, suddenly the home is transformed into a home -- that's part of what makes women so lovely.
Phenomenologically speaking, these are important things to consider.
Pregnancy is difficult and disruptive for many women, so it makes absolute sense to plan for it. There is no reason this planning needs to take all the way until the woman is nearly infertile, though. Our society has managed to get this priority completely backwards. In the proper state of things, women would plan their lives first around having children and establishing a stable family; and only after that was done would they bother with a "career," if they felt like it.
I don't think the low birth rates are a problem. Whom is it a problem to? To economists? To big companies who need a large and cheap labor pool and a large consumer market? To pensioners who need us to continue contributing to have their pensions? To ethnonationalists who want to maintain a majority "native" or "white" in their countries? I'm none of those and all of these causes either do not resonate with me or don't make sense at all.
Even if I did think this was a problem , I don't think there is a solution to this problem, it is the future, it is inevitable. That being the case, however, in the worst case scenario it is a problem that will self-correct.
My maternal grandmother was a school teacher, she had 5 children, my mother is an engineer and was a public servant for 40 years she had 2 kids me and my brother. We are already 2 generations deep successfully having kids with both parents working full time, and soon, hopefully me and my fiancée, which also works full time as a public servant (she is an architect) will follow along.
My point is: there are no excuses, if you need the government to hand you incentives to have kids, you already lost, you are *weak*. If you are scared to have kids for economic reasons you are self-selecting your genes out of the gene pool, and maybe that is not such a bad thing after all, that is what I meant when I said this might be a self-correcting problem.
Thanks for the read.