> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children.
Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent.
I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm in my early 30s and I wouldn't say staying single and not marrying is the "default" - yes, there's more people doing it, but I still know a lot of people who have coupled up and got married. I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone.
I have 2 kids, and the main reason people I talk to aren't considering a third is cost. Cost of an extra bedroom, cost of a larger car, incredibly high childcare costs - there's a very large real reduction in living standards that comes from going from 2 to 3. Compare that to my parents generation, where 3 or more siblings was the norm. I suspect a large part of falling birth rates isn't that loads more people are living child free lives, but that the people choosing to have kids are having fewer of them.
My feeling is that it's heavily friend-group or clique dependent, or potentially geography-dependent (metropolitan vs rural).
I'm also in my early 30s, but the majority of people I know are not married. I know about the same number of people who are polyamorous as married despite not running in those circles.
I know I'm an outlier because the stats don't hear anything close to that.
I will say that in the major metros, marriage still feels relatively uncommon. I think I've been to one wedding in several years, and it was a work acquaintance more than a friend (I was surprised to be invited, really). Most of the people I knew that were married were in their late forties and beyond.
> I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone.
I think it's important to delineate between people who want a relationship and people who want to get married. Relationships can exist absent a marriage, and marriages can exist absent a relationship. Some people don't want to be single, but don't want to be married.
That's the demographic that I've seen growing. I don't see people pulling away from relationships so much as marriage. Marriage comes with so much baggage, and a lot of the traditions are based around historic assumptions that don't hold true anymore.
The taboo of living together as a couple before marriage has largely disappeared. As a result, there's less incentive to get married as a matter of "moving forward" with your life.
Prior generations experienced marriage as a transformative event, whereas for my wife and I, it was a nice day, but our lives went back to normal afterwards.
Add in the fact that even a small ceremony is expensive, and it's no surprise that many people are putting it off or foregoing it entirely.
Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent.
I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm in my early 30s and I wouldn't say staying single and not marrying is the "default" - yes, there's more people doing it, but I still know a lot of people who have coupled up and got married. I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone.
I have 2 kids, and the main reason people I talk to aren't considering a third is cost. Cost of an extra bedroom, cost of a larger car, incredibly high childcare costs - there's a very large real reduction in living standards that comes from going from 2 to 3. Compare that to my parents generation, where 3 or more siblings was the norm. I suspect a large part of falling birth rates isn't that loads more people are living child free lives, but that the people choosing to have kids are having fewer of them.