Over the last few months, so many people have written in, wanting to know why so many people in the Millennial generation and Gen Z generation are choosing not to have kids. And so, by popular demand, I am going to explain this recent phenomenon that is occurring in certain areas of the globe to you. 

There is not one single reason why so many people in the younger generations are not having children. Rather, there is a list of reasons. So, let’s start with what sits at the top of the list of main reasons that so many people aren’t having kids.

1. Starting with the millennial generation, the days of ignorance about family dysfunction are over and many in the younger generations have no intention of having children if they or the children will experience any of that dysfunctionality. The younger generations were the first to really consciously put two and two together. The painful things they are experiencing in their adult life and the way they were raised. To generalize, the outcome of boomer parenting was just bad enough to force a collective wakeup about parenting in general. Parenting before the boomer generation was nothing to celebrate. You could point to certain things that the even older generations did and say that they were worse than what the boomers did. So, you (and the boomers especially who are largely convinced that their parents were worse) might be asking what made the boomer parenting so bad that the suffering it caused created a mass awakening about family dysfunction?
   
   A. The single-family home (with no extended family) really became the norm during this time. This is a far bigger deal than people get. When a child is raised in a village, or an extended family situation, where the child has a sense of community, the child has many resources. If mom and dad are not providing a resource, or held a damaging perspective or were emotionally stunted, you could turn to an uncle or a grandmother or a neighbor to get a better perspective, to be regulated emotionally, to get a need met. By isolating the family unit, the parents become the sole source for everything. And this, makes poor parenting far more damaging because there is nothing to blunt it. To make matters worse, the boomer generation was the first generation where the dual income household became common. The result of the women’s rights movement was that boomer women were also working jobs, but with the expectation of still doing all the domestic duties, including raising children. This transition to a new arrangement between the genders was and still is a disaster. This led to maxed out mothers, who could not be it all and do it all. Boomer fathers were the first to slip into the modern male experience of not really having a distinct role anymore. As a result, many of the boomer fathers did not take real ownership of family life, including their children. Rather they acted more like occasional babysitters of their own kids. Their children suffered the consequences of this. On top of this, divorce sky rocketed, making parents even less able to parent well. On top of this, this was the era of “stranger danger”. Where a media frenzy turned the neighborhood from a safe, communal space into a source of fear. And children were cut off from community because of this. Due to all of these factors, the Millennial and Gen Z children were not well resourced. They lost access to many of the emotional resources and self-esteem resources and needs resources that previous generations had access to and did not recognize the necessity of. So many children during this time experienced neglect. The worst part is, their parents do not recognize themselves as having been neglectful when their child’s basic necessities were provided for. Food, water, clothes, toys, roof over their head.
   
   B. Boomer parenting was an emotional nightmare. Boomers were raised by a generation that was shut down emotionally due to economic crisis and war. They were not raised with any understanding of emotions. Because of this, many of them failed to establish true emotional connection with their children. Many of them failed to emotionally regulate their children and failed to co-regulate with their children. And many of them carried over severe emotional neglect and also emotional abuse into their parenting. Where their own parents were emotionally shut down and they were raised by simple and straightforward authoritarianism, many boomers swung the pendulum towards being hands off and they employed heaps and heaps of emotional invalidation. When their children expressed their perceptions and feelings, those feelings and the perceptions were immediately invalidated. The child’s reality was constantly denied. This is a gaslighting experience that creates a fundamental erosion to the child’s self-worth and sense of reality. On top of this, boomer households practiced "dishonest harmony”. They maintained a surface-level appearance of a happy family while refusing to address underlying emotional issues or conflicts. Family life was in and of itself, a gaslight. 
   Something important to understand is that the boomers viewed their parents as doing the best they could, given the horrible situations they were trying to survive. They view their parents as being broken by the world and not having the capacity to parent well because of it. And at the same time, they watched them sacrifice their personal self-interest for the sake of the family. In contrast with this, the boomers grew up and lived into a uniquely prosperous era. The good times. Millennials and below view the boomers as having all forces going in their favor. As people who were supported by the world. Boomers really focused on their own personal fulfillment and individualism. They chased personal success and esteem through career, they broke off marriages because they needed to find their own happiness. Children were expected to add to their happiness. Because of this, the bad parenting that the boomers displayed did not read as “doing the best they could”. It didn’t read as not having the capacity. Rather it read as: They have the capacity, but they are too self-centered to do it. Because of this, in contrast to the way their parents felt, the trauma the millennials and younger endured at the hands of the boomers feels unnecessary and deeply personal.
   Younger generations view the Boomer era as a betrayal and collapse of the multi-generational support system that is fundamental to the human race. To put it mildly, they see a generation that benefited from their own parents' sacrifices, who grew up with strong community ties in a system set up to guarantee them success. Only to take over and dismantle the whole thing. To build a world that served only themselves and that was rigged against their own children. To refuse to provide a societal structure for their own children’s wellbeing and life success. To get rid of all the resources and safety nets for their own children. To create constant global crisis. All while claiming, they "did their best.” And all while judging their adult children for struggling in the absence of all the things that allowed them, the boomer generation to succeed.         
   
   C. In the 1980s, views about parenting changed. The boomers recognized some of the painful parenting techniques as the reason they had felt pain and instead of just repeating the way they were parented; they began looking for other opinions. This was the era of the parenting book. Alas, some of the most detrimental parenting theories such as Parent Power and Sleep Training and The Cry It Out Method and Physical Discipline and the Helicopter Method and the movement of everyone gets a trophy and the importance of early independence were born and employed at this time. And the detrimental parenting theories made into books only increased in the 1990s. These methods created a ton of traumatization and developmental trauma. Boomers raised their children with a blend of ‘unconsciously exactly what their parents did’ and also ‘nothing like their parents did’. Unfortunately for them, instead of this leading to conscious parenting, this created a damaged generation with a lot of unmet needs.  
   
   D. Because of the way that these younger generations grew up, there was no “buffer” anymore to cover for the dysfunction of the parents. And coming into adulthood, they had real issues. Issues have a cause. In recognizing the cause of their issues, they started to see all these direct links between parenting and the bad outcomes they were experiencing. This completely shattered the idea that kids will just turn out if you meet their basic necessities. Rather, it painted the very real picture that everything a parent does or doesn’t do, everything that a child is exposed to, shapes their adult experience. They were living in the painful if not disastrous aftermath every day. In seeing these painful realities about the way that they were parented, they started to realize that the WHY behind having kids really matters. They started to ask themselves why they wanted kids. And a lot of them did not love their own answers to this. Suffice to say, all this waking up relative to the impacts of parenting made parenting a far more serious endeavor. One that must be done super consciously and intentionally. One where you must hold yourself to a standard. But this standard cannot be easily met and if you can’t meet it, you should not have kids. They woke up to the fact that there was a serious gap between the societal idea that childhood is this carefree, wonderful experience and bliss is about having a family vs. the reality of what they experienced. This will make you seriously second guess having kids. With access to contraception, the millennial generation is the first generation that really woke up to the fact that having kids is in fact a choice, rather than a given. And so, for many, the answer is NO unless XYZ.   
     
2. There was too big of a gap between the societal mantra about the formula for happiness vs, the reality that was directly experienced. Societies are made of collective ideas that everyone buys into. And one of these ideas is that happiness is about a certain formula. The formula of going to college, getting a good job, getting married, buying a house and having children together. Well, the millennial generation grew up indoctrinated with this formula, but when they followed it, the formula failed. They were misled. The millennials were dumped out into the world as young adults with all forces against them.  It is akin to releasing a bird from its nest in a hailstorm that would last for its entire lifetime. Tuition cost so much that they had to take out massive student loans. They were told that having a job would soon take care of that. But even with a degree, they couldn’t get jobs because there was a backing up of the natural cycle of job progression to retirement. Very few people could retire. Overqualified people had to take jobs they would not have considered before. The millennials were now competing in the workplace against their parent’s generation and even grandparent’s generation. Not only could millennials not compete against their resumes, they had not been brought up for competition in the first place. So now, they were in a highly competitive environment that they were not prepared for, they had debt they could not pay back, no use for their degrees and had to go back into the entry level jobs they had held before and during college. These were jobs where many had to hold two jobs, just to pay the bills because the cost of living had increased so drastically. They were forced to come to terms with the fact that they would most likely never be able to own a home. The Disney fantasy that they were sold as reality, that you meet someone, fall in love and it will be happily ever after, was falling apart and instead revealing a reality that relationships are impossibly hard and a lot of the time, they don’t work out. And so, the kind of quality of family life that all this adds up to is bad. Many of them realized that they couldn’t afford kids. And even if they could, the level of stress that would add to the chronic stress they already have, would make their already poor quality of life worse, not better. Gen Z never had these illusions to begin with. They grew up in the harsh realities that millennials had to discover over time. So many of them had a front row seat to marriage not working out and family life being a crappy experience and society being rigged against them that they reached all these same conclusions by the time they were in middle school. This is where the reality of the economic barrier to having children comes into play. Having a child is just too much of a financial and energy burden on top of the stress and burnout that people are already experiencing financially and with the complexities of life. What all this amounts to is that the mantra broke. And the reality that surfaced was: Quality of life may in fact be opposed by having children, both for themselves, and for the child.   
    
3. It takes a village to raise a child. Many people in the younger generation get this, only there is no village. The nature of the modern world, after so many boomers moved away from their families in the pursuit of personal aims and then so many in the younger generations have moved away from their parents due to high housing costs or jobs etc. has made it so that many younger adults find themselves living far from their extended families. And often far from their friends. With every single person in the workforce in a world where so many people are simply working to survive, everyone is too stressed out and maxed out with their own life to help each other out with childcare. Community has fallen apart in an era where people connect with each other online. In the generations before the Boomer generation, parents often viewed child-rearing as a lifelong family duty. But people from the Millennial and Gen Z generation often find that their parents are more interested in traveling or their own retirement than helping with the "village" needed to raise the next generation. Older generations have either checked out of the grandparenting role, or put in minimal effort and presence. Parenting in today’s world means doing it just mom and dad. But to make matters worse, because of the reality of modern relationships, divorce and therefore broken homes being what it is, single parenting is now all too common. There are too little resources and there is too little support to make raising children a good idea. 
    
4. In alignment with this last point, in today’s world, women do not feel like having children is a benefit to them, rather it is a serious detriment. While both men and women say that children would add to their stress level, there is a serious divide in career trajectory for women vs. men when it comes to having children. This is being called the parenting penalty. Having children leads to women being perceived as less reliable, less dedicated, less competent, less committed and less available for their careers and this often leads to fewer opportunities and lower pay. And the reality is, as a woman, you are expected to raise children like you don’t work and work like you don’t have children. It is a double bind that makes the old adage “you can do both, because you can do everything!” fall apart. Instead, it feels like an either or, because you can’t do both to the maximum that is necessary to succeed at either. Both are such high pressure, high stakes, labor-intensive endeavors. Men on the other hand, are perceived as being more reliable, more responsible and having more reason to work. This leads to better opportunities and higher pay. Women who have children are not seen as being the ideal worker and experience consequences because of this. Women who have children are also perceived as less desirable by men. It diminishes her perceived worth. Rather than motherhood making a woman esteemed, it causes her be seen as less valuable within society. This is compounded by the reality that in a society where there is no longer a village, a woman who works is going to need to now pay for childcare. Childcare is extremely expensive. The average family spends a shocking amount of their income on childcare. It also requires flexibility in a parent’s work hours, which most jobs do not allow for. Society still views women as the primary caregivers and so the burden of a sick child or a school holiday almost always falls on the mother first. This is forcing many women into part time work or less competitive roles so they can manage the extra housework and household duties. Not exactly encouraging for having children.  
    
5. Pessimism about the future. The future does not look very bright right now. A significant amount of people, are not having children because they don’t want to bring them into a worsening world. A world which is descending into an ever-worsening climate crisis. Environmental toxicity. Pandemics. So much political instability. The government and the system being one that they cannot trust, one that appears to be against the people, rather than for them. Financial inflation and struggle and even crisis. And also, the ever-present threat of war.  
    
6. Modern relationships are a disaster. The path to partnership that often leads to having kids, is tumultuous now a days. Marriage rates as well as people staying married are hitting record lows. People are really struggling to partner in a secure enough way that it leads to the choice to have children. There are many contributing reasons for this. Postponing children until the right partner is found can make people pass their window for having children. That window being defined by mental factors,  emotional factors, biological factors and life circumstance factors.         

As you can see, not having children is a growing global trend driven by very real causes. And now, you know the main drivers.