Woke people have kids too: the myth falling apart at the playground

Proge people have kids too: the myth falling apart at the playground

The scene is described by someone who claims to have witnessed it: playgrounds, judo classes and parent-teacher association meetings are full of families who vote left and raise their children without drama. There is no rule banning parenthood, not in Spain nor in the country the debate keeps referring to. What has peine is that the story of low birth rates has become an ideological battleground where each side blames the other for not reproducing.

Who has kids and who doesn't: what the data around us shows

The most common pattern is not ideological, it's about income and education. In a sample of 20 to 30 people of childbearing age, those with less skilled jobs —in the village or in the city— have one or two children, with the occasional case of three. The most highly qualified profiles, working in museums, foundations, universities or the media, stop at one or none. Leisure and travel play a role, but so does exposure to a wider world.

Some argue that this correlation hides something more uncomfortable: the perception that the future is not on their side. The comparison making the rounds is the one from the movie Idiocracy, where an educated couple decides to wait while another without education keeps having children. The pessimistic conclusion is that demographic natural selection favors those who plan the least. The optimistic one is that education only delays the decision, it doesn't cancel it.

Has having a family been banned? What's been banned is the discourse

Nobody has outlawed the family. What has spread, according to part of the analysis, is the idea that having children is a form of oppression, especially in discourse aimed at women. That message doesn't prevent anything, but it delays the decision, and delay has biological consequences: the older you get, the harder it is to conceive. The result is wasted time in relationships that were never going to work because the subject never comes up on the first date.

The argument gets more complicated when crossed with geography. In the United States, birth rates are higher in the conservative-leaning interior states than on the coasts. But the map also shows that the areas with the highest birth rates are the poorest, and that the countries with fewer freedoms for women are the ones recording the most births. The correlation exists; causation is another matter.

The factor nobody disputes: the economic moment

The complaint running through all this is generational. Someone who turned 30 in 2000 arrived with a degree completed, a paid-off home and a family underway. Someone turning 30 now faces a different job market and housing that doesn't cooperate. It's not a prohibition: it's a balance sheet that doesn't add up.

The full calculation, with the costs and timelines of each profile, leads to an uncomfortable conclusion for both sides. Neither have proge people given up on family, nor has the right found the formula to make it come free. Birth rates are falling on both sides of the spectrum, and mutual finger-pointing won't raise them.