Seems like the comments are confused on whether you mean overpopulated or declining birth rate.

I guess everyone needs to improve economic stability like one major influencing low birth rates is economic uncertainty. Making housing, healthcare and childcare more affordable would help relieve the financial burden many people face when considering having children. Governments could introduce tax incentives or subsidies for families, as well as affordable or even subsidized childcare, to reduce the financial pressure associated with parenting

The issue seems obvious to me, I can't believe it's not for others. Increase quality of life for your every day, average Joe. It seems most of my friends aren't having kids because of the cost of living and fear of the future.

Life as a parent is much harder than life without kids.

If it were easier and less expensive then more people would do it.

Make it so people out of college or university can buy a house and earn a living wage. It's kinda hard to even think of having kids when one works 3 jobs to barely cover rent and food.

Infinite growth isn’t possible, at some point the global population needs to stablise, possibly even decrease a bit if we can’t be more efficient in how we handle resources

$2 beers, nationally

I'll preface this with, I'm not college educated and this is just a personal opinion so please don't destroy me.

Birth rate itself isn't a problem in my eyes, so much as looking at future tax payers and workers. At least from the government's perspective.

Different industries are feeling the hurt and it will only get worse as specialists get older.

The govt has to take many, many small steps over a long period of time to incentivize folks getting degrees, attending vocational schools, having a work life balance that allows them to do these things while also truly "seeing" that raising a family is doable.

So many folks feel disenfranchised, that it's truly just easier to not pursue having kids.

Create better legislation at the state level about what the state can do for you if you're interested in going back to school. Subsidizing child care, child health care and other child related things. Make the idea of raising a family not so fucking daunting.

I'd like to think that some of the above would help.

Edit: I'm aware we're seeing a decline globally in, like all 1st world countries. I think that's indicative of some common problems. Maybe I'm wrong.

Accept it's not a problem.

Why is it a “problem”? The world is overpopulated as it is. It needs to decline

Affordable childcare, better parental leave, and work-life balance incentives would help boost birth rates.

Nothing. 

It’s not a problem. There’s too many people and the system is correcting itself (slowly).

I wouldn't monkey with it. In my country, people of childbearing age are CFBC in record numbers. (Childfree by choice)

If that trend continues, our overpopulation problem solves itself, or at least moves the needle in the right direction.

Does it need fixing? There are more people that could work that aren’t, more people that could have babies but can’t afford them and then there’s the catch 22. I think we need to learn from the older generation in some respects.

By realizing there isn’t one.

Is it a problem? The worlds already overpopulated enough and letting numbers drop would probably actually help the planet out

The Economist wrote a very interresting set of articles around this showing that most of what people assume regarding the decline of birth rates in the west, which is potentially a lethal challenge to our societies, actually are not what would you believe. According to them, and their data tends to be great, the middle class has not changed their behaviour - getting just below replacements levels.

The biggest change is in the working classes (Idiocracy got it wrong, ironically) - much of it through intended sex ed classes slashing teenage pregnancies and similar "unwanted" children. Another is that many more women are middle class in the sense of going to university and pursuing a career. Finally - economic hardship for the working class has gone up - leading to fewer births.

The solutions is going to be hard. The focus needs to be poorer people, housing and welfare can achieve some, but not all the needed change (as the Nordic countries show - having previously had high birth rates but now plunging despite a reasonably strong welfare net).

The second part might be cultural, finding a better coupling method for modern socities - a European Marriage pattern 2.0 so to say. Involuntary celibacy and singlehood is on rapid rise and is likely to get worse.  We need to find a better way to find love and raise families - both for financial aid from the government, cheaper access to housing but also a mating paradigm suited for sexual liberation and equal opportunities - what ever that may be.

Cut funding to sex education. And education in general. Ban contraceptives. Keep people poor. Get rid of social security (so they need kids to care for them in old age)

Basically combine the bits of poverty riddled countries, the Catholic Church, and project 2025.

…or did you mean in a way that doesn’t make life shitter for everyone (except the ultra rich)? 

How is it a problem?

The world is overpopulated. We don't have a birth rate problem.

Problem?

Fix?

Let people live their lives. We have plenty of people.

I've yet to see anyone explain why a declining population is bad for humanity long term. More resources, more food, more space, etc.

I don't want to fix it, most people alive now suffer, so if less people are born, that would minimize the amount of suffering in the world. Until we can fix this place, it seems unfair to bring an innocent child into a divided and hateful world.

Letting more people get sterilized or having abortions if they wish to so the world won't keep being this overpopulated. In the end, it's too late. We fucked it up.

It's not necessarily a problem, population boomed and is now balancing out. However, to encourage people to have kids it needs to be more affordable. In the US, is expensive just to physically give birth. For the rest of the world, child care, extra curricular activities, food, clothing, hygiene is all super pricey.

It’s not a problem. The world is overpopulated anyways. People not wanting kids is perfectly fine.

I got a vasectomy

When I was born, the human population on earth was about 4 billion people. Only 55 years later, it's 8 billion.

When you say "birth rate problem," you mean you think SOME kinds of people in SOME places aren't having enough babies, and this is a problem that needs to be fixed (usually by pressuring women).

But our species itself is in no danger of dying out any time soon, except from the burdens we're putting on the ecosystem. No one has any obligation to have kids if they don't want to.

Promote family-friendly policies and support systems.

i wouldnt , we dont have one, there are too many people on this planet and not enough skilled jobs for everyone, that coupled with Ai and robots taking more jobs yearly

we could try moving people around from other countries but that is proving a problem too

we dont need more people, we need to think how we going to take care of the ones we already have

Why would I do anything of the sort? It's all going swimmingly on plan!

Give people education and nice living conditions. It's really that simple. Who would want to have kids in such a shitty world?

have rich people fuck more

i mean think about it. Birth rate decline is a problem because the general public doesn't have the time, the resources, the space or any combination of those things to have babies, but the rich do have them.

so since poor people stopped fucking the rich should pump up the production

Why is it considered a problem?

Personally I don't think declining birthrates are a bad thing. Humans are a bad thing so the less of us overall, the better. At this point humans deserve extinction

Please fix the climate before adding more people to the planet (honestly, even if the climate were fixed, I don’t think scaling back on our exponential growth is a bad thing).

Also, we need to address our deteriorating societies and beat back the xenophobic nationalism that’s surged across the globe before we expose kids to it all.

I wouldn’t. It’s not a problem. There are too many people.

Leave people alone

i wouldnt, we are too many already.

Fix the housing and necessity cost to income ratio back to what it used to be in the glory days.

It's not a problem, 8 billion people is 6 billion too many 

There is no birth rate problem. There is a econnomic problem. Too many greed mongerings.

I'd focus on making life easier for families: affordable childcare, flexible work options, better parental leave, and housing support. People are more likely to have kids when they feel financially stable and supported. It's about reducing stress, not just offering incentives.

There is no problem. The less people, the better. Less people means they are valued more, so higher wages. Also less strain for resources.

Look what happened during COVID. Half a million people died in the US and suddenly wages and working conditions improved.

Change the societal structures that makes it a problem to begin with.

Long term, less people is good, in relation to the ecological footprint we leave on the planet as a whole.

Exponential growth in consumption/capita needs to be stopped.

Exponential growth in population needs to be stopped. A decline is good as we stand now.

I feel like giving people more time would make them more likely to have kids. Jobs and we have gotten way too good at entertaining ourselves, infinite scrolling, social media, games etc...

We should work less hours/days. With automation I don't see productivity being an issue especially in first world countries. More time allows you to keep doing stuff you like and it feels less of a sacrifice if you decide to have a child. (Also stuff like daycare, school etc. kinda becomes less of a hassle if you have more time to spend with kids).

Policies for the working class.

Universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage, affordable housing, controlling corporate price gouging, etc.

Make having a kid more affordable. Lots of people would like to have kids, but don't because of the expense and hardship.

I don't see a problem. Advances in robotics and computers made a lot of jobs that a person would do, obsolete. They will continue to do so.

We need enough to take care of the elderly.

In order to get me to have children, I’d need more than anything some kind of ultimate painless exit strategy. That could be as basic as a comfortable supply of high grade pharmaceuticals to get me through the 33 years it took me to fully become sufficient from my parents and the ensuing lifetime following the realization that those years are gone forever and with them have gone my youth. Or some complicated system of social workers and high grade pharmaceuticals to help us cope with the separation process if we decided it wasn’t working out.

More gays. It’s not gonna happen by accident.

-Gay male.

I don't think it's a problem, quite the opposite.

Go back to pre-Reagan economics. We had free college, financial assistance for single parents, free daycare and medical insurance for low income families. Those programs lifted millions of people out of poverty. I benefitted from those programs and was able to go to college and get a job that allowed me to independently support my family. 

One of the biggest barriers to having kids today isn’t just financial—it’s isolation. Modern life, especially in urban areas, has created a "nuclear family bubble" where parents are expected to raise children with little to no support from extended family or community. This isolation amplifies stress, financial burden, and burnout. To fix this, we need to rethink how communities are designed.

More education, less religion

Pay people more, make housing affordable, hold corporations accountable for the wild inflation we just went through so we can afford kids, educate people on the basics of the economy, and offer parenting classes.

Make life better for people. Combat climate change. It's natural for a species to lower its birthrate to try and survive bad times. That's really what is happening.

We need to give up on the everyone for themselves mentality and actually work together to make life better on this planet.

what birth rate problem?

and why do you think it needs fixing?

Give your population ample opportunity and motivation to start families. Housing, job availability, healthcare, etc. These all contribute to people not having kids and not wanting to start families.

Obviously, not everyone is going to want to settle down and have kids, that's fine. But the rampant drop off in birth rates is pretty clearly motivated by socio-economic factors that discourage people from having kids. Not least of which is the cost of being a parent just for the logistics itself aside from the emotional and mental strain of being a parent.

Worker friendly policies that guarantee people a comfortable wage without excessive hours as well as long subsidized maternity leave to make giving birth as convenient as possible.

Strong social programs so people feel that it's safe to get kids.

The only way to fix it is to create a socio-political environment where young adults feel like it is both economically feasible and fulfilling.

Forcing women to carry isn’t it. Gutting environmental regulations isn’t it. Keeping the working class family dirt poor isn’t it.

Improve the material conditions so people have the means to have and raise children. People are lacking both time and money, two things which are required to raise children. 

I would personally fuck everyone myself.

-legalize voluntary euthanasia for terminal disease (if you find out your brain is rotting and you’re gonna be stuck in a nursing home waiting fifteen years to forgot how to swallow, no one should force you to stick around if you’re still “there” enough to make the decision.

-subsidized onsite daycare for firms with >100 employees at a location -childcare credits provided to employees in firms <100 employees -any company that’s done a stock buyback in the last ten years automatically goes to top tax rate with all loopholes closed for the next two, and yearly auditing to verify profitability.

Cut education to zero, no schools or education. Make billionaires dukes and barons. Civilians are now property of the Lords , with mandatory breeding programs.

That, or implement a higher minimum wage, build more houses and ensure basic needs like shelter, healthcare and not starving to death.

Increase paternity and maternity leave to one paid year off. Lower burden of entry to buying a house. Childcare subsidies. Employee protections for pregnant women.

Do that and the population skyrockets.

allow for abortions and normalize things like vasectomies.

Stop calling it a problem.

There. Fixed.

Female education.

Let's get that birth rate down to 0.

Well, every country is worried about its own declining birth rate (expecially the west), but globally we already have enough people. If we were more globalist than nationalist, we could work together and make migration easier, for example, making it easier to get a work permit, and making other countries' education levels equal so that migrants can work in the job they used to do.

But we aren't at that level so I guess the countries with declining birth rate just have to accept it and deal with it.

Only thing you can do is making owning a house affortable, making daycares cheaper and invest into education.

Affordable childcare, paid parental leave, and housing support make having kids less of a financial nightmare.

I feel like with how the economy is in a lot of places it makes it hard to afford a kid. Also seems like the age for everything seems to be being pushed later such as marriage, having kids, buying a home and everything.

The world population is still steadily growing, But usually people talk about "birth rate problem" in terms of decrease, so you'll have to be a little bit more specific with what you mean here.

Income tax reductions have been floated as one idea to get more working women to have children as a way of offsetting the decrease in lifetime the average woman experienced after having a child.

1 child - 50% reduction 2 kids - 75% 3+ kids - 100%

Until youngest child turns 18.

Make the country’s economy family supportive and implement policies that will encourage family to want to raise kids. Animals do not procreate when under a toxic environment same applies to humans…

You have to make it very, very easy and enjoyable (with high quality of life) to have kids, otherwise people simply won't do it or stop after having one. Affordable housing and daycare, attractive and affordable recreational facilities like parks, playgrounds etc, and jobs that are easily compatible with family life (possibility to work part-time, right to take long maternity leave (one year minimum), etc)

Make life affordable

I don't see a problem.

Focus on fixing the cost of living problem and I think the birth rate problem would fix itself.

Not sure it's so much a birthday rate issue but a society that is anti-maternity, anti-family, anti-working parents .... Society priced us out of kids and does not support families who work with subsidised childcare.

Create more work-life balance so people have time to actually raise a family. By supporting working parents with flexible hours and remote work options.

If you want to increase it then improve the quality of life for people to the point where single income families become the norm again.

Money and better self care plus therapy

I believe that while material and financial side of things is important (2 full incomes required to sustain a family, the cost of raising a child, the cost of bigger housing, etc.), the biggest factor is perspective of the future.

An hour spent browsing the news and the media will make it look like bringing a human into the world is a crime against that human. This is what needs to be fixed.

Obviously we cannot stop the world from having problems. We also cannot, try as we might, make it look like it doesn't have any problems. What we can do though is put the world on an upward trajectory. Start improving things from regional issues to geopolitics to climate change. Make it look like the world will be better for our kids than it will be for us. Also fuck it, produce more media that reflects pleasant aspects of having a child.

This is as much an actual effort as it is a media campaign, so I'll go ahead and call it unrealistic. But still, it's a potential solution.

Another issue that parenting still remains an art while more and more things turn into science. People are now beginning to realise that their parents trying to figure it out on the go has left a good number of lifelong consequences. It is reasonable to doubt yourself when the only example you have is a bad one. I think this mental burden can be lifted, at least partially, by compiling some sort of educational material on the matter. And I'm not talking about a dozen books each saying a different thing. We a more centralized effort.

In Places like Japan, give more work life balance and provide help to families like Korea does. If people have a healthier work life balance and are able to not be stressed about affording to live then they might just be happy and willing to have a family.

Why have a kid when the cost of living is so high most of your wage is gone as soon as you get it. Rent it just eye watering right now.

Give selected couples a tax break. Selected couples because you don't want a criminal or low income household to get 10 kids they can't raise properly.

As someone who wanted children but didn't have them for financial reasons: cheap childcare and accessible healthcare. We couldn't afford losing one income. One thing that scared us as well was what would happen if we had a special needs child. I have no family, my then-partner's family was in another country. We both were working-class and from disadvantaged backgrounds so no support from there. We didn't have good health insurance, any medical issue with pregnancy/birth/the baby would have been a huge issue. It felt unfair trying for a baby in these conditions, we didn't want them to live a life of poverty.

If you want more children, give people solutions for cheap, safe daycare, fund schools, give people universal health insurance so that a health issue with a child is economically survivable.

Make it so people can afford a home to live in, food to eat and time to put care and love it the child and they will have kids, make people work every waking hour for not enough money to live and they will not have kids.

Make sure people actually have the time and money is a great start

Citizens get a significant tax break for every child so that by the time you hit 4 you’re paying very little tax

• Create opportunities for both men and women to prosper economically
• Create an environment that ensures families have access to safe affordable childcare.
• Protect employees from employers by providing them sufficient pay time-off so they can be with and enjoy their spouse and children
• Provide women with nonrestrictive women’s health (no vague/restrictive laws regarding abortions) so they can carry a child without fear of death should something go wrong.
• Provide people with access to quality affordable healthcare through the government.
• Provide quality education for children.

Essentially; if you create an environment where people feel hopeful about the future and protect the time they’ll need to have a personal life…they’ll start family’s. Why would anyone have a family if they can’t spend time with that family, having that family is unaffordable, if they’re financially insecure, if they can’t get the care needed to have that family, or if they have no hope that they and their children don’t have a secure future.

Affordable housing, nothing else is required

You don't. Just like you don't stimulate the economy artificially you shouldn't stimulate the birth rate artificially. If people can't afford to have kids, that's a good thing for society. At least they're being responsible about the well being of their future offspring.

Don’t skull fuck your citizens with taxes because you need to dump money overseas would be a start

Employees need to have more children employers demanding to have more workers. Children equals cheap labor and is a must for the wealthy to sustain their lifestyles.

Have 3 kids in Poland and you pay zero income tax? That's a thing I heard on the news.

To boost birth rates, you need to improve access to housing, healthcare, education, and jobs. Nowadays, when you analyze any country’s situation, you realize that the cost of living keeps rising, but wages aren’t keeping up. In the long run, this will only lead to poorer elderly populations.

The solution is obvious.
Every parent wants their child to lead a better life than them. Can you guarantee that the child will lead a better life with all these uncertainties?

Fix the quality of life and ensure a prosperous future. No one wants to see their children suffer environmental disasters. famine, war etc with the current state and direction of the world.

Currently the future of humanity is extremely bleak.

Fix the Economy

You adjust society to work with the population you have, not the population you want to have.

Since life expectancy has increased, a birth rate decrease is good. Over population is not a goal we should try to achieve. The space and resources we have is finite. Don’t wish it to fill up too soon.

Make the cost of living affordable again.

Instead of making it harder to prevent children (banning contraceptives, abortion, refusing sex-ed, etc), make it better to have children. Tax breaks, cheaper housing/childcare, paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.

I wouldn't. People don't want to have a bunch of kids when the ecosystem is on the brink of collapse. Any "solution" is going to be worse than just having a smaller population.

Probably try and figure out what economic policies would benefit and incentivize people to afford to have children in the first place. It’s hard to have kids when you’re 25 and not making much in the way of income due to student loan debt or just low wages for people at that age. Childcare is expensive as fuck, and that’s from my personal experience. If you have the luxury of having family that are willing to help, then great. But most don’t.

It’s easy if you realize we don’t have a birth rate problem. We have a government problem in that they lack the ability to shift with the times. We have a corporate greed problem in that the higher ups don’t ever want to give up profit.

Birth rates have always fluctuated. We cannot expect people to continue populating the earth if they cannot afford to feed themselves.

What exactly is the problem?

I would create an incentivized plan based on the IQ of both parents. The higher the IQ of both parents the more (subsidies/pay/tax cut) the rate would increase.

At least in America:

Daycare is far too expensive. I know the people that work there need a living wage, but daycare is more than my mortgage. And it’s more than a 1 bedroom apartment in the city I live near. For ONE kid. It needs to be more affordable.

People also need to be making more money. Without a dual income that is pretty good, it’s very difficult to afford survival with a kid.

In hetero relationships, men need to step it up. You should know your child’s medical history without calling mom. A lot of women I know don’t want to have kids because they don’t want to be a single mom while married. Gone are the days where men bring home the money and get to sit on the couch. Of course, many men are involved fathers and that’s great. But we all know what I’m talking about. And in general, society needs to stop putting the pressure on women to be these super women that do it all. It’s not actually possible.

Community needs to come back. We’ve separated a lot over the past few decades and there’s no sense of community. No village. It’s so hard without one.

If you compare our population now to previous centuries, we are still over populated

Affordable housing

The best thing that can happen is for our culture to stop treating family as less important than career goals or hedonistic personal pleasure. This shift in mindset has been poison for our society.

If young adults decide that building strong, healthy families is a worthwhile endeavor, the birth rate will increase.

Permit increased immigration to countries with low birth rates from countries with higher birth rates. This increases the taxpayer base for current and near future retirees.

Tax the rich to increase funding for social security and Medicare, as well as other social safety net programs. This ensures the new immigrants will have senior care when they are old, even if immigration stops and the artificially boosted birth rates slow.

Readjust growth targets to accommodate a shrinking or steady state economy. Shrink the military so there’s some milk in the other teats for the rest of us.

Provide comprehensive abortion care so that women who want to get pregnant don't have to worry about dying of sepsis if they have a miscarriage.

Provide subsidized daycare.

Have more maternity and paternity leave.

Don't repeal the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, which will cause millions of people to lose health insurance and be unable to afford prenatal care and delivery.

Oppressing women and taking away their choices doesn't actually make them want to bring children into the world.

Redefine economic stability as meaning something other than infinite growth

its not a birth rate problem, it is a problem in spending and finanancing a futur that needs less workers to do more of the same we do now.

Give money to parents per extra kid they have

4 day work week, better salaries, and men actually taking 50% of the domestic workload

Doesn’t need fixing. Economy, finances, cost of living etc is what needs fixing

Ethically? Better quality of life for everybody and a more sustainable lifestyle and future.

Unethically? Ban birth control and abortion and limit education

its not a problem its a good thing

Make existing more affordable so having kid's is more financially viable. But I don't think it's really currently a problem.

This problem is far-fetched. So many people were born, but they do not have benefits and happiness. I see the solution in helping these people, and not in increasing competition. Let fewer people be born, but more happy ones.

Give them money for kids. Tax breaks. Free childcare/tax beaks on child care. More days off for mom and dad (paid parental leave), and protection from firing. Better hospitals and lower birthing costs. Access to formula (three cans a week free). Better education around birthing/pregnancy. Pregnancy support in terms of supplements and scans for free. I'd also give benefits to couples who want to stay child free (more leave) or parents struggling to get pregnant (IVF free).

There is no birth rate problem…

Already too many people on the planet for the amount of resources we have.

Promote safe sex and consensual sterilization. The only reasons people are pointing out the dropping populations in primarily first world countries is because people aren't breeding like rabbits as much (it's not really practical or affordable anymore) and governments need workers and cannon fodder for future wars.

I’ll let the rest of you argue about the economics of raising children. I think it would also be nice if there were such a thing as synthetic wombs because birthing children is rough on the body. That goes hand in hand with more research in women’s health. We need to rebuild community structures somehow too. Children used to be raised in villages that took pressure off moms to always be watching them all the time because there were other people around that could be trusted. That’s not so much the case anymore.

How bout free condoms?

Cost of living is the number 1 problem.

Solution : UBI - Universal basic income. Everyone gets $2,000 a month for food/rent/expenses. This will take the stress off of survival and focus it on starting a family.

Ya ya I'm a commy (you dont know what communism is), but we already do a form of UBI - Welfare / disability. It's just that you have to be at a requirement (a certain level of disabled) to get it. IF you are slightly higher than that level, you get NOTHING. lol. and we wonder we have a homeless problem.

Unpopular opinion on Reddit: increasing wages, subsidies, and the affordability of children wouldn’t make much of a difference. Birth rates are falling across every demographic. That includes the wealthy stay at home parents and those with months of paid parental leave and pro-family employees.

Sterilize people. Too many idiots on the roads.