No sex drought for us as my wife and I still do 2-3 times a week

[theking]

We were on the fence for a years and then finally decided to have one kid and go from there...Still one and done as we are content with our choice:

Forget a sex drought, the real reason the birth rate is dropping is much more mundane
If we want to encourage women to have babies younger then we need affordable childcare and flexible working practices

Not many people have 10 children, but Elon Musk does. “If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble,” he declared dramatically in 2021. Musk, it seems, is worried about the labour force declining. Low birth rates and a worldwide decline in fertility concern many others besides Musk but he has the money to pay for the IVF treatments which produced his twins and triplets, and for a surrogate to produce a second child with Grimes. Is this a model we should aspire to?

Miriam Cates MP sounded a similar alarm at the National Conservatism conference, claiming that our falling birth rate was a bigger threat to the West than Russia, China or climate change. She blamed “liberal individualism” for failing to deliver enough babies. She then went on about cultural Marxism as such people do, as it is more important to hold on to a fantasy about why people are having fewer children than get to grips with the reality.

Are the “OMG! I forgot to have children” generation, selfish women who have been stripped of hope by destructive Left-wing ideology or are they in fact making decisions based on much more mundane stuff? Stuff like not being able to afford a home of their own, the huge cost of childcare, the shortage of men who want to parent with them.

Tories such as Cates and Daniel Hannan who are voicing these concerns are echoing those of far-Right leaders such as Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban who are explicit about the need to replace their populations. A certain number of babies have to be born in order to support an ageing population. If this doesn’t happen and it is not happening here, we need immigrants to help us manage. That is a hard thing for the Right to acknowledge but in the UK we would need the average woman to have 2.1 kids and the figure is currently 1.58 in England and Wales and 1.29 in Scotland.

[Believe_N_Me]

It's bad enough that teachers are viewed as babysitters and also paid poorly. Must we make actual childcare cheaper, too? I sympathize with women who make the decision to delay motherhood due to financial restraints, but the solution isn't to cut the salary of the childcare industry or to subsidize it either. The solution could be in how businesses run their work hours. For example, I personally would love to see banks have a second shift. No child in a two-parent home should have to be placed in childcare. The parents can do what mine did, work different shifts.

What I'm saying is that a lot of white collar type jobs can move to having a second shift or offer remote work. Even what I do could take place in the evening and at home. I just work on the computer and it doesn't need to be an 8-5 shift. Sometimes I just work from home, too.