Won't someone please think of the boomers?!

Young folks have been priced out of housing & healthcare, you can be fired from your job on a whim, food is astronomically expensive, the political climate is tense, your basic human rights could be rescinded at any time, the future of the planet is being murdered by shitty capitalists with 0 regard for human life....

I mean, who wouldn't want to bring a child into this world right now?

Eat shit.

I'm hunting for a new job for the second time in less than a year, and I'm honestly a skilled professional with over 10 years of experience, with a lot of proof that I do great work. The labor market is stupid right now, just down right stupid. Full of executives searching for short term profits rather than anyone wanting to actually run a company well. That's alone is a huge reason, on top of everything else. I don't even know if I'll have stable employment, and that means I don't know if I'll have stable health insurance - so genuinely what are any actual incentives to my generation to have kids? Literally are there any beyond just "you have a kid now"
- It's shit, right? I'm so sorry. I hope that stability comes to you very soon.
  Reject tradition. You have no obligation to sacrifice your well-being because some old, out-of-touch fuckwads want something life-changing from you. Can't even afford groceries.
  They can foster a child if they want one around so badly. Or go sit at a park. Or volunteer at the church nursery or something, ffs.

Once again Gen-X is ignored. It's Gen-X hitting grandparenting age.

My two kids probably won't be parents, and I'm ok with that. I want them to be happy more than I want to enjoy grandkids. Whatever they choose, I'll be happy with.

I felt pressure from Boomer parents to have kids, and I didn't want to do the same to my kids. That's a hard nope.

Seems like old = boomers and young = millennials for journalist and a lot of people
- People are having kids later in life, and the youngest millennials are only ~29.
  Millennials are predominantly the children of Boomers, so that’s why these two generations are basing singled out.
  Gen-X were called the a Baby Bust generation for a reason; there aren’t enough of them around in order to swap population metrics compared to what came directly before and after.
Yeah this is a good point. Young boomers are, what, 65?
- About 59 I think.
I mean you can still have grandkids. I've heard they're great deep fried with a light cornmeal batter and a creamy dill sauce.
Once again Gen-X is ignored.
I will maintain, as I always do, that getting lumped in with the wrong group and ignored is the most Gen-X thing going right now.
With that, I conclude: whatever ::eye roll::.
maybe if gen x did something we wouldn't be forgetting about them /s (i kid i kid)
but seriously, go get into the government or something, you guys are the prime age for entering the government right now.
Gen X is normally described as 1965-1980 so 44 to 59 years old.
Average age of mothers first birth right now is 27. It was around 25 for most of Gen X. So 25 + 27 = 52. Yeah new grandparents are not boomers.

Told my mom if she wants grandkids she better stop voting for conservatives. Didn't work, and a deal's a deal.

I mean, she's a boomer, if she said she had I still wouldn't trust her.
Boomers: "Reality can be anything I want."
she better stop voting for conservatives
Democrats have won the popular vote in the last seven of eight elections. If everyone struck this deal, I would expect to see significantly more grandkids than we're getting.
But also, states like California and New York and Massachusetts are seeing grandkid-gaps bigger than anything you'll find in Utah or Ohio or South Carolina. If conservatives are causing the problem, you would expect to see more Gen Alphas in the bluer states, wouldn't you?
- The poorer families in those states make do better than poorer families in red states, but not enough to support having kids

Maybe next time leave the ladder behind instead of taking it with you.

The wealthier Boomers left behind millions of tiny little ladders specifically for their kids to climb.
The poorer Boomers died before hitting retirement age, or died in debt, or bankrupted themselves paying for end-of-life health care, or got scammed or otherwise denuded of their accumulated wealth.
Incidentally, its the wealthier Boomers who continue to set national policy from the board rooms and lobbying offices established by their own parents and grandparents. Meanwhile the poorer and more isolated Boomers are left to drown in their own poverty, ineffectually raging at the collapse of neighborhoods and the destitution of their pension funds and the deterioration of their suburban homes, unless their children and grandchildren are able to help them out at the end of their days.
Folks like to pretend this is one generation pitted against another. But its selection bias. The only members of the Boomer generation you hear from are the ones that came out on top. The rest have been killed in the wars or poisoned by industrial waste and lead pollution or foreclosed into homelessness to die on the streets or confined to digital communities like Facebook where they're drowned out by waves of misinformation accounts. Legions of dead Boomers never got to decide how the current generations live. They were burned up and thrown out, just like the current generation of bourgeois GenXers and Millennials and Zoomers plan to do with the rest of us.

Maybe they shouldn't horde and partition their wealth from their children and do everything possible to ensure every penny is spent before death.

You're not wrong, but this is more of a class issue than a generational issue, although in this case they certainly intersect. My boomer parents don't have any money; they got screwed over by the 1% just like the rest of us.

Make college and homes unobtainable.. You get what you get and you don't get upset.

- Boomers repealed all the laws on those guys in exchange for better returns on the 401ks and home sales.
  They sold humanity to our corporate overlords, they need to be held to account.
  They're so anti-socialism: Suspend Medicare for 10 years, let the system sort itself out.
- And Boomers allowed those organizations to exist by their votes.
- no it's the lack of building supply and market liquidity.
  Shit like airbnb is going to have a more influential effect on the market than something like blackrock.

"Oh no it's the consequences of my own actions!"

I want the lions share of the profits of our economy! I want to pull the ladder up behind me! Why aren't these lazy millennials having kids for me!?

You're entitled millennials!

/Vomit

you fucking millennials and your avocado toast cost me grandbebbies!

Shouldn't 'ave fucked up the economy and environment, simple as

Yeah cuz they're hoarding the houses.

How dare someone elses wants effect me!!

Who writes this trash...

Imagine a society ran for benefit of gereatrics and nepo babies at the expense of young working people

Now open your eyes 🤡

Make the world a place that will be liveable in 100 years and pay people enough to exist:

A) without children, and B) with children

and boom, problem solved. Statistically, anyway.

Aww. Maybe if they didn’t spend their days treating their kids like their bank accounts and actually voted to help them afford things like housing and health care they’d have grandkids.

Instead they supported ghouls like trump and clinton instead of the guy who wanted to give everybody health care!

Guess you shouldn't have been entitled little shits and fucked up the world, then.

Elder millennial here. I had kids, my brother didn’t, and my kids, though young enough to change their minds, are adamant they won’t have kids.

I think the more interesting stat likely unfolding is the marked decrease of great grandparents in a generation.

To be clear this is not a “threat to society” or whatever, people can decide if they want kids or not. Just a shower thought.

The real solution has always been immigration to get more bodies in the country managing the economy. It’ll never happen though.

Way to focus, Wall Street Journal. We can always count on you for in-depth journalism

/s

Oh they are deep into something, it is just is not as nice smelling as journalism

"You should have kids so you'll have someone who will take care of you when you're older."

Bruh, I'm not subjecting a person to this godforsaken world so I can guilt trip them into babysitting me when I'm old and senile.

as someone who's parents' retirement plan was that - I absolutely agree. There's no way anyone should subject their kids to that level of guilt and stress.
Bring me behind the barn and shoot me dead instead. Less wasted oxygen, more food for the fauna.

I own two used cars and, after inflation, both of them combined cost me less than the birth of my first kid.
Used? After 20 years children cost well above half a mil. When you factor in all of the food, clothing, sitters, school, trips, and of course college, you've set yourself back by quite a bit
- This doesn't even factor in the monetary value of the parent's time
Way more than any car I’ve bought.

even if I had kids my dad would be excluded from grandparenting due to the trump worship. don't need that kind of influence on the adult family members let alone kids.

Boohoo

Wouldn't this be prime age for boomers to be great grandparents? Unless they mean paying for their grandkids college...

Boomers are 1946-1964. Definitely the older in the generation are in the great grandparent years, especially if they and their kids had kids young, but the younger boomers, especially if they and their kids had their first kids later, will be grandparents.
- I wouldn't exactly call that prime time for them to be grandparents, then...

Boomers should have thought of the shareholders.

That is, the kids they fucked over with their bullshit ideas and absolute misunderstanding of the world they created.

I'd love to be able to speak with my parents again, but (and I never thought I would ever say this, if you had asked me 10 years ago) I need to see some heads popping out of asses.

For some reason I'm not surprised about Facebook being explicitly boomer-centric

@scrubbles

Some people seem to assume it's their right to become grandparents...

We have a new multi-block set of apartments going up in the suburb near me that they're doing the same about. It's going to ruin the town! It's going to lower property values! Won't someone think of the children?!
It was parking lots. It was just parking lots before. It was a place for commuters to drop their car and go into the city. I can't even with these people. The best part is that those apartments will probably bring in more tax revenue than their entire single-family subdivision!

So the share that has grandkids is the share that can afford them, right?

well, there are just more boomers, and less gen x/millenial people. It should follow that there will be less babies lmao.

Granted cost of child raising is still likely to be a more influential factor, it's not the only factor, and we were going to see this anyway so.

In another timeline where boomers didn't destroy the housing market, didn't ignore climate change, and didn't continue to vote for regressive policies, maybe they'd have grandchildren.

I'm sorry but the collapse of the housing market and lack of action against climate change has way more to do with the commodification/privitization of housing and energy (as well as labor exploitation in the case of fossil fuels) than some arbitrary generational definition.
Don't let yourself be convinced to blame fellow workers for the consequences of corporate and state action.
- My point was that they've continually voted against their own interests (and against the interests of the rest of their class, which is why they now don't have grandchildren). I will continue to blame them for that at the very least, as they've continually proven that they enjoy the corporate and state inaction (because they've always voted to keep it up).
  It should also be noted that this is a post about boomers, so of course people are going to bring them up in the comments.

Boomers should have though of the future of their children. Now they reap what they sowed.

This is kind of whatever... basically white boomer doomism as a result of later childbirth. White people, especially privileged white people, are definitely having less kids, but that's not true for everyone. My theory is that it's because if you grew up with white privilege, you expect to be able to give your child that same level of privilege. If you can't, it seems "impossible." If you grew up poor, you know that you just make it work (if you want to). Like, I grew up poor and am not white. The idea that I "need" to own a house to consider having children is hilarious to me. My parents still rent.

People are having kids. Most people who are younger than 30 are astounded to realize just how many women do have children -- according to Pew, 85% of Gen X women have children. Trends for millennial women are slightly lower but not much. The idea that this is some emergency is just dumb alarmism.

When they polled people aged 18-30 in the 90s and 2010s, and 2020s, the amount of people who said they would never have children is lower than now, but not by much. Some people change their mind and a significant majority of people do have children, especially if you're not white or Asian. There is a very real racial difference though, so I'm not just bringing that up for no reason.

Regardless, it's people's choice. Whenever I see articles like this, it always seems kinda "Great Replacement Theory" adjacent. In my head I always put (white) in the title. I.e., a smaller percentage of (white) baby boomers have grandchildren, and (white) boomers are (scared they're going to be replaced).