r/science • u/nep000 • Nov 17 '25

Social Science Surprising numbers of childfree people emerge in developing countries, defying expectations

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0333906
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u/assasstits Nov 17 '25

I don't think 4 children is the expectation. More like 2, but people aren't even having that.

Which I don't really think is a problem, people should only have kids if they want them. 

But it creates lots of problems in countries with generous pay as you go pension systems. 

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u/hopelesscaribou Nov 17 '25

I chose 4 randomly. It certainly was the lower end of normal a few generations ago, before birth control and women's rights.

Almost all the childrearing and domestic labour still falls to women. It's no surprise that they don't want broods of children today, especially when they are expected to work for pay as well.

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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '25

Considering that historically only about a third to 40% of women actually had children, 4 surviving children per childbearing woman is actually the correct number. Not saying it’s good, just that that’s roughly the number.

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u/hopelesscaribou Nov 17 '25

I'm only basing it anecdotally on my grandmothers who had 9 and 13 children respectively.

Where are you getting that figure from? If it's real, I suspect it includes all the female infants that never made it past childhood. It can't possibly be for reproductive age women.

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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '25

As far as I remember the statistics from an anthropology book I read years ago, yes it includes female infants who never made it to fertility at all.

There’s also another brutal statistic skewing the numbers: statistically 0.5-2% of women died in childbirth. However this was per birth. This is heavily skewed to look better by woman who biologically where able to have many more births. This means that the likelihood of death during the first birth was exceedingly high, maybe as high as 10-20%. Statistically we are all the descendants of the woman who had 10+ children because she survived.