Hot take: When we talk about "people" in general wanting or not wanting to have kids, it obscures the fact that half of the people involved - future dads - fully expected for most of history to reap all the possible rewards and do almost none of the work https://twitter.com/iridienne/status/1391431373362122753

Admittedly, it was also different in those days because there WERE direct economic rewards, not just personal and social ones - you could straight up make your kids work for you and most people did, rather than just hoping vaguely for them to support you when you got old

But even leaving that aside

Perhaps the lower birthrate is because in our society to an increasing extent the people making the decision are the ones who will bear the costs of it, and the reluctance just reflects what the true cost has always been

(This obviously is the most ice cold of ancient takes and yet it seems to need frequent repeating)

Anyway I'm not even saying this to talk shit about those feckless millennial men - I'm one of them after all

I would argue "I don't want to do all the work associated with parenting, therefore I don't want a kid" IS the mature, grownup decision to make

"I don't want to do all the work associated with parenting, but that's okay, my wife can do it" makes you an asshole, and it's also clearly the attitude the vast majority of dads in our society used to have

And, frankly, "I don't want to do all the work associated with parenting, but that's okay, once the kid actually arrives I'm sure we'll figure it out" is bullshit and in practice usually ends up devolving into the previous one

That's what all those articles about dads vanishing during the pandemic are about - none of them consciously went into this planning to have to pick up the slack on this kind of labor, none of them were emotionally prepared for it, so they just didn't