Having kids is quite easy. Most of my colleagues that don't have any kids got into this situation because they pursued careers (long live the corporations selling dreams about careers) and then at 40 years old they figured out they cannot have kids anymore, even with fertility treatments they now afford. The younger ones that are still age 25 to 30 strongly believe it is too early for having kids and they postpone that for another 10-15 years.

Having kids is easy for a man. For a woman, it is anything but.

And women’s freedom to choose when and how many and who to have children with is what has caused birthrates to decline.

From what I can tell, women have been eating the true costs of birthing and raising children since forever. Now they can choose the terms under which they are willing to subject themselves to the risks and effects of childbirth, breastfeeding, and child rearing, so the “free” market should help see what the appropriate price will be.

Of the women that have kids and I talked to, none complained that having kids is not easy. I know women that after having the kid they planned for, decided to have 2 or 3, even 4 and it was their decision, not their husband's. The only women I heard complaining about having kids are the ones that have none, which is a bit strange - they have only second hand experiences, if any, of having kids.

Yes, now the future of the human race is practically at the hand of the women only. So far it is not going well, as a society and as a race.

> The only women I heard complaining about having kids are the ones that have none, which is a bit strange - they have only second hand experiences, if any, of having kids.

This is an implicit confirmation bias; of course more of the women that don't want kids will have no kids.

No, they won't. Even in developed countries where having children is financially manageable, people do not want kids. Less than 2 on average. The wealthier, the less kids. It's a consistent international conclusion.

When people do not NEED kids to survive, they'll have few or even none.

This is an important point, but I do believe there's truth to both arguments. The common wisdom in developed countries is that you don't have kids until you're financially stable, and increasingly financially stable includes education and career building through your prime reproductive years for both potential parents. And your point, kids were an asset in an agrarian society without machinery, they're not assets in our modern industrialized societies. I think there are more factors, one is the perceived state of the world as a worse place than before, true or not, and another is the increasing control that external entities like the state exert on the internal workings of families. That's not exhaustive, but I do think overall the incentives to start families are just no longer there, so people are doing less of it.

I agree that modern society is not set up to encourage having children as well as that people start about a decade too late with it.

But still, even in societies with excellent maternity leave and child support, people do not have more children.

Why not? Because things like "free child support" in reality are a clever distraction. It's not there to help you have a large family, it's there so that the parent keeps working full-time.

It doesn't really solve anything. There's no point in having a (large) family if you can't be with your family.

It doesn’t matter. The birth rate will still drop. Accounting for ALL social issues including “making it easier to have kids”, the birth rate will still drop because male fertility keeps dropping in any country that’s reached a certain level of industrialization. This includes BOTH developed and developing nations. There’s no definitive culprit, but many researchers believe male infertility is being caused by the endocrine disrupters that leech from plastic products that we use for food applications.