Half of childless Canadian women don’t want kids, nearly a quarter in their 40s aren’t mothers: Statistics Canada

Seems like only rich and poor people are having kids, middle class is increasingly going childless

This isn’t just a Canadian trend in case anyone thinks it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

I mean *gestures broadly at everything* What did you expect?

There are enough people in the world.

I also remember, years ago, headlines saying we must prevent teenage pregnancies. 

All throughout school we were told there is an overpopulation crisis worldwide. Now even if we wanted kids we cant afford to eat anyways.

The survey started at age 20 and I know more than a few people who didn’t want kids at 20 but changed their tune once they got a bit older.

That said, the birthrate is definitely low and the increased cost of living is certainly going to impact the capability and willingness of people to start a family.

Almost finished the hard part of raising two kids. My advice? Don’t have kids

I think its good. It shows that women are choosing to do what they want to do.

I don’t want to make my babies live in a society run by billionaires.

At the same time, I don’t like that oppression is taking away the potential joy of having children.

It’s complicated.

there’s some strange ass comments in here.

Why is it whenever the topic of “Parenting” or “kids” happen, Reddit users get all fucking weird and aggressive.

*childfree

🤷🏻‍♀️

I didn’t want kids. I chose to cultivate an interesting life instead. I have no regrets.

To be honest, it wasn’t the kids I objected to as much as the idea of being married. Weddings give me the heebie jeebies.

Fun fact: every woman I was friends with that got married ended up divorced.

I think it comes down to money, specifically, the cost of raising children. Everything from EI maternity to children being sick, etc.

It’s the same everywhere in the world. China, the country I came from, recorded 7.92 million babies born in 2025. For a country with 1.4 billion people, that was absurd (some calculated the total fertility rate to be 0.91 there). Canada’s total fertility rate is probably 40% higher than China (that is to say, the average Canadian woman has 40% more children than the average Chinese woman) because the last time I checked, it was 1.26.

Then, there is the problem of children’s personalities. My sister has only 1 child. He is 11 and is extremely independent (he can function largely unsupervised by anyone at this point). This allows her (a single mother) to work (on paper) 70 hours a week (some of these work hours are visits to patients’ schools as a nurse, so she doesn’t actually work that many hours, but she gets paid those hours), earning over $100 000 a year and for it not to affect him too much (as in, he gets A or B grades in school and teachers do not report any problems). If this child was not so independent, it would not have worked out too well, because his biological father probably works even more hours than his mother, since he is a business owner, which would have meant that he is not available to care for him.

Having children is too unpredictable. That is why fewer and fewer people are doing it.

I’ve never wanted kids and I think some of this is women realizing they don’t have to have kids.

I’m a 30+yo Canadian woman, who will hopefully turn 40 one day, who will never have children no matter how much my drs think I will change my mind, or how many low birth rate articles there are.

WITH THAT SAID- I support people having children if they want them, and I think our tax dollars should actively go to aiding and incentivising folks to reproduce, as well as having better child care programs, more robust school funding+programs, as well as better support for parents in all walks of life– from better Paternity/maternity leave, to implementing vacation that is MANDITORY TO TAKE(like the UK), as well as PAID sick days, higher Min.Wage, better laws in place against groseries companies taking every penny they can, and some relief for renters/new home buyers to actually get young folk + families into homes.

In a perfect world, we’d implement UBI, and with that for every child born they would be put into the UBI program and it pays out an amount per child to the parents until the child is 18, and switches to paying to the child. I also support immigration to bolster our population, but I know many folks who hate immigration due to concerns over core differences between countries/cultures and their fears that more immigration will inherintly change Canada.

None of the women under 30 in my family have any interest in having children, ever.

Did you also talk to men? My wife has some good friends who would have loved to have kids, but their partners bailed on them and decided THEY didn’t want to have kids. It takes two to tango.

The inverse headline would be “Half of childless Canadian women want kids, but don’t have them. Why?”

Also the data on how many children children women want in Canada vs how many they actual have leaves a pretty significant “missing birth gap”.

Canada has very low average fertility, but framing that overall trend as some kind of intentional choice by women who don’t want children would be a mistake.

We basically outsourced child birthing and rearing to mostly developing countries, and import “ready made” adults

It’s certainly a choice for developing a nation

This is the result of women having autonomy & choices for what SHE wants for her own life. Fuck yes I love to see this 🤗🥹👏🏻👏🏻