You can design cities for families all you want, but if you keep lying to people and telling them having children is bad, and it's better to live alone, then they won't do it. Not to mention crime and taking money from families and paying people who are tax leeches.
Are you using “modern society” as a synonym for whichever country you live in? There are countries who directly tell their citizens that having kids is good and offer them financial incentives to do so. For instance:
> PM Lee urges Singaporeans to have more children, and to do so earlier
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/pm-lee-urges...
> Nearly $7 billion will be spent on marriage and parenthood initiatives in financial year 2026, up from over $4 billion in 2020.
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/7b-to-be-spe...
And even with great child-raising policies, Finland has a fertility rate as bad as the rest.
Problem is always money. Why society is going to subsidize 2 year of paternity leaves for everyone? Better and easier to complain about "kids nowadays".
It's not just telling people what having kids is or is not, it's that the MONEY spent on family promotion is laughable. Countries with those policies are just putting a bandaid. People is already NOT having children.
The reason all this is "mostly okay anyway" is that everyone normalized being selfish. So money and time and resources are spent on oneself, and that's okay, who's going to require anything different from the government?
Kids are tomorrow's most valuable infrastructure asset. We're just poisoning the water supply.
What tomorrow is there with +4°C in 2100, and what happens in the meantime?
(greenhouse gases emissions are not slowing down, we're closer to 2100 than we are to the invention of the transistor).
The kids will solve it if we give them the right tools. Education, time to learn, confidence.
We're on a trajectory that is not solvable before several centuries at least, probably millennia. It spans more generations that we've had since the fall of the Roman Empire. We're only 2-to-3 generations away from 2100/+4°C.
Our kids can merely adapt to, with immensely reduced liveable and cultivable surface area on the planet.
The whole culture they'll have to invent/live in to find a "solution" barely exists today, if at all.
That's a solution, no?
The original comment said:
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design
These are two very different statements.
My thinking is that growth-based economics is eating itself.
Why would you go through the trouble of kids when you can just mostly offload the time and cost of that on someone else then tax those kids when they're grown for your own retirement and get about the same size slice as the person that actually raised them?
That calculus totally changes if the childless neighbor can just send armed men to collect the neighbor child's income and redistribute it to themselves.
Contraception (especially the pill), has eliminated this trade-off. Now people can have their cake and eat it too.
Joy!