When ‘hum do, humare teen’ meets the child-free generation

Many young people today carry a checklist of what they must accomplish before they can even consider their dreams within reach. And just when that list seems manageable, life adds three more pages to it.

For many, the first item on that list is resolving what they themselves lived through as children. Poor family dynamics, constant conflict, financial precarity that made everyday living a struggle, and the weight of watching parents sacrifice everything – these are wounds this generation is determined not to pass on. They refuse to let the cycle repeat itself.

This is why so much energy now goes into safeguarding mental health, physical health, and a peaceful family life – the things they feel they were denied.

The problems they can’t fix alone

But personal healing is one thing. What about the problems no individual can solve?

The world hasn’t made it easy. An education system plagued by repeated failures, an economy that struggles to create secure jobs, and institutions many young people have little faith in combine to make parenthood feel less like a milestone and more like a gamble. Even a university degree offers little insurance: graduate unemployment in India stood at 11.2 percent in 2025 – more than three times the national average, exposing a structural mismatch between what India’s youth are trained for and what the job market can actually absorb.

How can young people plan for a child’s future when they can barely see their own?

No room to make it right

Layered on top of this is how little room there is to recover when things go wrong. India’s youth unemployment rate climbed to 15.2 percent by March 2026, up from 13.8 percent less than a year earlier, with joblessness among young women running notably higher than among young men – a gap that speaks to the layered disadvantages women in particular face when weighing whether to build a career and a family at once. A worsening climate and growing distrust in institutions only deepen the frustration.

The cost calculus doesn’t help either. Between rising school fees, private tuition, healthcare, and the sheer expense of urban housing, the price of raising a child in India’s cities has climbed sharply – even as the jobs meant to fund all of it grow scarcer.

Beyond economics, parenthood itself is no longer seen as an inevitable milestone. For many young Indians, choosing not to have children has become a legitimate life choice rather than something that needs justification.

If careers alone explained falling birth rates, India’s fertility decline should have looked very different

Not just an Indian story – but not just a global one either

It would be easy to dismiss this as generational whining, or to place India alongside Japan and South Korea in a familiar story of ambitious, career-driven populations opting out of parenthood. But India complicates that narrative.

Most Indian women don’t work for pay outside the home, unlike their counterparts in East Asia or Europe. If careers alone explained falling birth rates, India’s fertility decline should have looked very different. Yet, India’s birth rates have fallen to levels comparable with countries where female workforce participation is far higher – suggesting career ambition alone doesn’t explain what’s happening here. The reasons run deeper, into the everyday instability this piece has laid out.

Nor is this decline without consequence. A shrinking working-age population and a growing elderly one could strain pensions, healthcare, and public finances in the years ahead – a reality the youth themselves will inherit, even as they’re blamed for creating it.

This generation believes children should inherit their parents’ gains – not their struggles. The thought of bringing a child into a world this fractured is, for many, reason enough to opt out.

A question worth asking

So, before anyone lectures the youth on why they should have children, perhaps the real question is this: why should they be made to pay for the failures of a generation that came before them? Until job security, affordable education, safer cities, and functioning institutions stop being aspirations and start being guarantees, no amount of sloganeering will change the arithmetic young Indians are doing in their heads.

(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)