So have economic and social obstacles become deterrence to having children?

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, yes, and there are three reasons.

If you all want to look this up now or when we're done here, the title of this article is called Why Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. And it was just published over the Memorial Day weekend. So it's all about, you know, how the number of babies born in the U.S. has been plummeting for years and it hasn't recovered. And within this article, although they didn't label it in this way, they actually named three reasons why, you know, three reasons for this phenomenon.

Number one, young adults say they can't afford to buy a house as nice as the one their parents

raised them in, or pay for childcare while they're still repaying student loans. I'm going to come back to these things. I'm just going to read them first.

Number two, many men lack their earning power to be providers

since blue-collar jobs don't pay as well as white-collar jobs.

Plus fewer men are employed.

And number three, more women can't find a marriageable man

because their own greater education and economic status

makes it harder for them to find a man who measures up.

So right up my alley, and what we talk about here on the show,

regularly.

The median age at which women now give birth is 30, three years older than it was in 1990.

And despite advances in fertility treatments, women who delay having kids until their final

childbearing years reduce their chances of doing so, obviously,

not just because it narrows their biological window,

but because other priorities and roadblocks can more easily derail their plans.

Which, again, I'm always talking about that if you prioritize and plan accordingly,

you're good to go.

If you try to do it after the fact, it's just, it just doesn't work as well.

Sometimes it doesn't work at all because it's not just, like it said, that your body isn't cooperating, but you have created a life that is set up for something else altogether.

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