The press and policymakers have been calling out the fact that birth rates in advanced economies are falling even faster than demographers predicted. For instance, from a Lancet report in March based on “a global research effort led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine:”
- By 2050, over three-quarters (155 of 204) of countries will not have high enough fertility rates to sustain population size over time; this will increase to 97% of countries (198 of 204) by 2100.
- Pronounced shifts in patterns of livebirths are also predicted, with the share of the world’s livebirths nearly doubling in low-income regions from 18% in 2021 to 35% in 2100; and sub-Saharan Africa accounting for one in every two children born on the planet by 2100.
Recent stories confirm this overall trend. For instance, from CNN:
The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than a century….
Meanwhile, births continued to shift to older mothers. Older age groups saw smaller decreases in birth rates, and the birth rate was highest among women ages 30 to 34 – with about 95 births for every 1,000 women in this group in 2023. Women 40 and older were the only group to see an increase in birth rate, although – at less than 13 births for every 1,000 women – it remained lower than any other age group.
Now, the question is why are fewer deciding to have children? One can see how the perceived to be horrific consequences (no groaf! proportionately more useless eater oldsters!) are among other things leading conservatives to try to curb women’s reproductive control so as to make sure, unless they renounce sex, that they have babies.
A new Wall Street Journal story tries to find some answers. As we’ll explain in more detail, it finds that the high cost of having kids only partly explains the problem. The article also contends that “high cost” is due not just to an increase in costs like housing but also to parents deciding (or perhaps more accurately responding to new norms) to spend more on high cost activities like pre-school education and summer programs. Another factor is some couples deciding to consume more retirement, as in plan to retire early.
While these factors no doubt accurately reflect what couples have told the Journal about their conscious processes for deciding not to reproduce, your humble blogger feels compelled to point out their are additional issues that are not sufficiently acknowledged in polite society.
The first is that bringing up children, even before getting to elevated contemporary notions as to what that should amount to, is inherently not gratifying work. 1 Yes, most parents really do love their children and are willing to sacrifice for them. But there IS sacrifice. Recall that aristocratic women would nearly always farm out childrearing to the help.
A second factor is that neoliberalism, as in the promotion of nuclear families to facilitate labor mobility, has made the job harder. People used to live very near where they were born. Parents could turn to extended family for help: grandparents, aunts, cousins, siblings. Media accounts of parenting are consistent with the idea that there is a lot less active help from relatives now than in the 1950s and 1960s.
Third is that the responsibility for bringing up the child, by default, is the mother’s duty; men have an option as to how much task support (as opposed to legally mandated financial support) they provide. Approximately 50% of first marriages end in divorce, and the odds increase with second and third marriages. 25% of US families are single parent households. So if a married woman has a child, she faces much higher odds than in the 1950s and 1960s of having her husband leave her. So there are rational reasons for women being chary of child-bearing, even though most won’t admit out loud to concerns about relationship durability, even in a presently seemingly solid one.
An extreme example of this dynamic is Japan. Marriages in Japan are not a great deal for women. The sort of stably-employed salaryman that was a good catch works six days a week, and often comes home late and drunk due to office norms of hanging out at the workplace even if there is nothing much to do, going out after hours, and long commutes.
When contraception plus more female access to the workplace hit Japan, many young Japanese women preferred to stay at home with their parents and have a job rather than get married. The fact that the “parasite singles” phenomenon is much decried has done little to change women’s behavior. I would be curious as to whether those who read Japanese or are otherwise culturally plugged in can indicate whether there is any recognition as to how marital norms are directly contributing to Japan’s baby bust.2
Fourth is climate change and the (potentially internalized as opposed to articulated) concerns about social and political stability in light of greater competition for resources. I probably have a skewed sample due to having most of my younger contacts as progressive-leaning. Among them, I heard quite a few expressing deep doubts about having kids, not just from a planetary load perspective but “Could I be subjecting them to terrible conditions?”
Finally I suspect but cannot prove that the childless couples are underplaying the role of the increase in many costs over time on their decisions. Mind you, some of the interviewees are explicit that they think it is not responsible to have kids if they don’t have enough to provide for them well. But the Journal itself fails to look at cost increases in relevant categories, such as housing, health care, transportation and food compared to average wages since the 1970s. As we know too well, housing and heath care have seen very high increases in real terms. But readers have also pointed out that this is true for categories we don’t think about as much, such as cars. In the 1960s, a typical working person could generate enough discretionary income to buy a low-end car outright in a matter of months. No longer. To put it another way: look at how dramatic they think the tradeoff is between time of retirement if they have kids v. don’t have kids. If the difference was lower, how much of an impact would that have on decisions?
Now to some snippets from the Journal:
Americans aren’t just waiting longer to have kids and having fewer once they start—they’re less likely to have any at all…Childlessness accounted for over two-thirds of the 6.5% drop in average births between 2012 to 2022…
Throughout history, having children was widely accepted as a central goal of adulthood.
Yet when Pew Research Center surveyed 18- to 34-year-olds last year, a little over half said they would like to become parents one day. In a separate 2021 survey, Pew found 44% of childless adults ages 18 to 49 said they were not too likely, or not at all likely, to have children, up from 37% who said the same thing in 2018.
The first couple showcased talks about money concerns, and contrary to patterns I have observed among peers, it is the husband, and not the wife, who is eager to have kids:
Giovanni Perez, 38, has been trying to convince his wife, Mariah Sanchez, 32, that they’re ready to become parents….
Sanchez isn’t sold.
With a single mom during her early childhood and a brother 15 years her junior, Sanchez grew up helping with diaper changes and bottle feedings. Before she has kids of her own, she wants to move from the couple’s one-bedroom apartment into a bigger place. She also hopes to climb the ranks at the advertising agency where she works, ideally doubling their combined income of $100,000.
“I know what it’s like for a child whose parent wasn’t prepared for them,” says Sanchez. Still, she admits, the amount she thought she needed to earn before having children was far lower a few years ago. “It feels like a moving target,” she says.
The story does not pick up on her observation that her perception of what it would cost to do an adequate job as a parent has risen over what clearly is comparatively few years.
The Journal plays up the notion that parents now feel responsible to provide enriched childhoods, and that is driving up expected costs as much as increases in essentials:
Parents are spending more on their children for basics such as housing, food and education—much of that due to rising prices. Another factor, however, is the drive to provide children with more opportunities and experiences….
Middle-class households with a preschooler more than quadrupled spending on child care alone between 1995 and 2023, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Department of Agriculture data by Scott Winship at think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
Yet only about half of the increase is due to rising prices for the same quality and quantity of care. (Child care prices are up 180% overall since the mid-90s, according to BLS data.)
The remaining half is coming from parents choosing more personalized or accredited care for a given 3- to 5-year-old, or paying for more hours, Winship says.
The article acknowledges the time cost of helicopter parenting. Like the many dinosaurs among our readership, I can’t fathom how structured kids’ time is these days, and how it can’t be good preparation for their adulthood to have their parents setting so much of their schedules. Even when I was six, as long as I was home for dinner (a strict time in household) and back by 8 PM, I was free to do as I liked, which included to go around the neighborhood on my bike and hang out with other kids.,
Beth Davis loves her niece and nephew. But she isn’t envious of how much time and money her siblings spend bouncing between volleyball tournaments, baseball games and trips to the mall to replace outgrown clothes….
With a combined income of $280,000, the couple is able to put about $4,500 a month toward what they hope will be a mid-50s retirement. Another $2,600 pays rent on a sprawling Creole townhouse. The remaining $8,000 or so—much of which they assume would have been eaten up by child-rearing—goes primarily toward enjoying their lives.
I am not about to attempt scenario planning, but I would guesstimate that most people like the Davises who are planning for retirement, early or not, underestimate the cost of assisted living or at-home care late in life, particularly since long-term care insurance has been repriced to reflect risks and now is not deemed affordable by many potential customers.3 Of course, even though children historically have served as old age insurance, there are way too many cases where the offspring can’t or won’t help much.
Some childless couples admit to not being willing to compromise their lifestyles:
Trevor Galko and Keri Ann Meslar, 44 and 42, both grew up in the suburbs assuming kids were in their futures….
For Meslar, who works in growth strategy for a CBD company, part of the justification for leaning into her kid-free reality was wanting to avoid making the same sacrifices she saw her parents make.
She says she can’t remember her mom or dad buying anything new for themselves while she was growing up so they could afford for her and her three siblings to join sports leagues and attend out-of-state colleges.
Finally, a big subtext of the article is that not having kids is now an acceptable choice and the kid-free can find similarly-situated couples with which to socialize.
In the long run, this demographic change would help reduce climate change pressures not just via fewer children translating into lower demands on planetary resources, but also less perceived need for environmentally costly dispersed single family homes. But this shift even though it seems rapid in population terms isn’t coming remotely fast enough to prevent probable bad outcomes.
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1 Think of all the bodily fluids! And then the propensity of young children to find creative ways to kill themselves.
2 One issue across most if not all advanced economies is that women’s increase in education, rights, and earning power (and related media cheerleading) also elevated their expectations regarding “progress” in gender norms which has in many respects not happened. Consider the fact that couples where the woman is the primary earner have such discomfort about that that they typically take steps to hide that. And that’s before getting to the fact that higher earning women really are less marriageable. From the Atlantic:
The economist Na’ama Shenhav has shown that a 10 percent increase in women’s wages relative to men’s wages produces a three-percentage-point increase in the share of never-married women and a two-percentage-point increase in the share of divorced women.
3 My father tore his hair trying to get good data on typical long term care usage and came up short. Information may admittedly be better now. He came up with women on average needing three years of care and could not find any info on men. He bet correctly, getting a good long-term care policy only for my mother (he figured he would not linger, which turned out to be correct) for a total amount that indeed wound up covering the 25 months of expenses my mother incurred. And she had about 10 months left at her then-current burn rate. But a big part of why the money went as far as it did was I moved down, so she needed only 13, not 20 or 24 hour coverage, proving there was some value in kids as old age insurance.