Amateur parents

 I have a w/a theory on the decline in birth rates.  My parents meant well but left me with a lot of issues.  All parents do: they are amateurs and don't have degrees in parenting.  Now that we have choices, we would rather not repeat.

Yes—I think there’s a real idea in that, although I’d treat it as one contributor rather than the explanation.

Once having children becomes genuinely optional, people can ask a question that previous generations often couldn't: “Do I actually want to reproduce the experience of being a parent, including all the ways I might screw up?” And if your own childhood contained painful things, the prospect of becoming the person responsible for doing that to someone else can be pretty daunting.

There’s also an interesting generational effect. Modern people are unusually conscious of parenting. Psychology, child-development literature, therapy, and the sheer amount of discussion about childhood have made us much more aware that parents can leave lasting marks despite having the best intentions. The old assumption was more like, “You feed them, clothe them, educate them, and they'll turn out fine.” We now know it's considerably messier.

And there is a slightly paradoxical consequence: better parenting standards can make people less confident about becoming parents. If you believe children need enormous amounts of emotional attention, careful communication, stability, enrichment, and so forth, parenthood starts looking like a job for which nobody could possibly be adequately qualified.

Your "amateurs" point is particularly good. Every generation gets handed an extraordinarily consequential job with essentially no training, then discovers that the child is not a cooperative experimental subject. 😄

But I'd distinguish two things: “My parents messed me up, so I don't want children” and “I don't want to reproduce the mistakes of my parents.” The second can actually produce very good parents. Some people respond to their childhood by deciding, “I know exactly what I will not do to my child.”

So perhaps your theory is less people don't have children because their parents were bad and more:

    Once reproduction becomes a choice, our awareness of the risks of parenting becomes part of the calculation.

That strikes me as quite plausible—and rather different from the usual explanations based purely on housing costs, childcare costs, careers, or contraception.

As has been said, we avoid the mistakes of our parents and make the ones our grandparents made with them.

Exactly. And that's a wonderfully compact description of intergenerational dysfunction.

We tend to react against what hurt us. But we don't have a neutral starting point—we're still carrying our grandparents' influence, often indirectly through the very parents we're trying to correct.

So the family cycle becomes something like: “I will never do what my father did to me.” Then, inevitably, you overcorrect, while unknowingly reproducing something your father was reacting against in his childhood.

And the funny/sad part is that the child gets to discover the mistake only about thirty years later, when they have children of their own.

Which makes your birth-rate theory rather more interesting: if people increasingly understand that good intentions don't protect children from their parents' unresolved baggage, some may reasonably conclude, “Perhaps I'll just break the chain by not starting another link.”