Now, we’re not having enough babies
Along with AIDS, nuclear war, and other issues, the population crisis was a key concern among my liberal cohort in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Zero population growth was seen as a critical issue for the survival of the planet. We worried about deforestation, running out of fresh water, and drowning in our own garbage, but despite these threats, I still pined for a family larger than the one I grew up in.
For most of my childhood, I had a younger brother at home and two stepsisters who lived far away. I dreamt that having another sibling around would somehow change the household dynamic enough that my parents’ fighting would become less noticeable or that my father’s hostility toward me would be diluted by the presence of another person. For a year in eighth grade, one of my sisters came to live with us. It was an imperfect human experiment, at best, with too many uncontrolled variables and unwilling participants. It didn’t achieve what I had thought another sibling might. It might have even made the underlying conditions worse. But I was undeterred. I wanted a bigger family.
I had always told my wife I wanted three children. But she seemed pretty resolved that two was the optimal number. It was the number she had grown up with, and it felt affordable and manageable for two working parents raising kids in New York City. She used to try to tell me that she only wanted one so that two would seem like a fair compromise.
Of course, this isn’t a decision a man can push on a woman. Even though I was always committed to being the best kind of father, having children is necessarily a greater burden on women than men. Even in an egalitarian marriage, childbearing and childrearing have a disproportionate impact on their bodies, their health, and their careers. In the end, it was she who decided we should have a third.
Despite the years of talking about having three children, when the time came, I was the one who was terrified — terrified about what it might do to our already perfect family, terrified about our ages and the potential for birth or developmental abnormalities. Were we crazy to press our luck? Was I being selfish? What about the planet? My wife was the one who reassured me that these concerns were unlikely, insignificant, or just silly. A friend had once told her, “You’ll never regret a child.” This became our guiding refrain.
Concerns about a population explosion have shifted to dire predictions about a baby bust — around the globe as well as here in the US. Between 2010 and 2020 over half of US counties, home to a quarter of Americans, lost population. While the US population grew 7.4% during the decade, this was the slowest decade of growth since the Great Depression. In the 1990s, the US growth rate was 13%. The main culprit is falling birth rates. After falling precipitously in the 1960s, the total fertility rate was steady or rising for the next 30 years, but in 2008, it fell below 2.1, the population replacement rate, and has since declined to 1.67.
Of the counties that lost population in the decade prior to 2020, 90% voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The pandemic only made matters worse — 2021 was the first time since 2014 that US population expanded by as little as one percent. The US is not alone in its population decline. Close to half the world’s population currently lives in countries with low fertility. By some estimates, 91 countries have fertility rates below replacement levels. Spain, Portugal, and Thailand could see their populations halved by 2100.
It once seemed that declining birth rates were the obvious result of education, gender equality, delayed marriage, and rising standards of living, but now it’s not so clear. At least in the US, birth rates have cratered, because young women are not having as many children. Women aged 30 and above are actually having more children. It is only women under age 24 who are having fewer, but dramatically so. And what’s more, the decline among younger women is itself concentrated among teenagers. More than half the drop in US fertility is explained by women under the age of 19 now having almost no children.
This is a clear victory for those who value the improved economic and educational outcomes for children of teens — and the young parents themselves. But for societies at large, low fertility can be disastrous. Countries will age dramatically, translating to fewer working-age people and possible labor shortages in many sectors of the economy. Low birth rates can threaten welfare systems, healthcare, and the broader economy in innumerable ways.
Pinpointing the root causes of declining fertility is as elusive as the policy prescriptions are varied. China’s one-child policy was extremely successful in controlling family size and population growth, but the country has been less successful in reversing those trends. China probably overreacted when it instituted its stringent population controls in 1980. Now facing demographic catastrophe, the government offers incentives ranging from childcare to tax breaks in order to encourage parents to have three children.
The interplay of geography, culture, income, identity, and other factors complicate intervention strategies. In most countries, existing measures tend to benefit professional mothers. And most cash incentives are earnings-related rather than means-tested. In Singapore, parents receive lump-sum payments to purchase a home, which is beyond the means of low-wage families regardless. Since 2000, France has spent 3.5% to 4% of GDP annually on cash subsidies, services, and tax incentives, but still, in 2022 fewer children were born in the country than at any point since the second world war. Similarly, South Korea has spent billions on pro-natal investments with no demonstrable results.
Norway offers mothers generous parental leave, income subsidies, and plentiful childcare. Incentives like these throughout Scandinavia were shown to impact birth rates in the 1980s when they were instituted, but as families became used to receiving them, the impact diminished and the overarching trends resumed. Some incentives can have perverse effects. Generous leave policies, for instance, can contribute to workplace stigma associated with parenthood.
In democratic countries, at least, families with means will likely have as few or as many kids as they like, regardless of policy interventions and economic incentives. Today, at the age of 24, college-educated women in the US want an average of 2.2 children, similar to their Gen X and Millennial predecessors. But based on current trends, they will likely have these children a little later than before (30 instead of 28) and undershoot this target as well.
Younger and lower income women may be more susceptible, at the margins, to intervention than their more well-off counterparts. But when we know that a first-time mother in her mid-30s will earn more than twice what she would have earned if she’d had children a decade earlier; when we know women who become mothers in their teens are more likely to develop health problems; when we know that their first child is more likely to drop out of high school and to grow up without having both parents at home, is this the right course?
At the end of the day, it’s not worth it to bribe, coax, or coerce women into having children they don’t want — let alone force them to do so by limiting their rights to contraception and abortion. We must value women, children, and families enough that policies to help children grow and prosper aren’t just about sustaining economic growth but rather about seeing our shared humanity. No family wants to raise children in a world absent optimism about their future.
Scott Galloway’s TED Talk, How the US is Destroying Young People’s Future, asks the question, “Do we love our children?” He cites numerous statistics suggesting that we don’t, in fact, love our children, because how could we, if everything we do seems to be making their lives bleaker and their future prospects dimmer? Our tax and economic policies have engineered a dramatic shift of resources and prosperity from young people to older people. From minimum wage to housing policy, from college accessibility and affordability to tax treatment of earned versus unearned income, the deck is stacked against young people. And they are decidedly pessimistic and increasingly angry about what they see.
Galloway promotes a variety of policy prescriptions in the areas of economics, technology, social policy, and mental — more progressive tax policy, break-up of big tech, focus on education, and investments in initiatives that bring people together and strengthen our sense of shared purpose.
This TED talk wasn’t specifically about birth rates or fertility, but it struck me that since the answers to the problem appear to be the same, then maybe the root causes are the same — or at least related. Is all of this frustration and despair among young people related to their declining fertility? It sure seems possible, perhaps even probable.
When we were considering having a third child, in addition to existential concerns, like our age and the environment, I also had practical worries. We had a terrific babysitter, but how would we manage the logistics of three children and two jobs? We felt fortunate to have three bedrooms, but how would the apartment feel with three children? And how would our second child react to giving up his own room for the baby and to sharing with his older brother? Was it important for each child to have their own room?
Apparently, over the past 50 years in the US, each child having their own room has become a “normative ideal,” as houses have gotten bigger and families have gotten smaller. According to US census data, from 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, and American Community Survey data from 2022 indicates that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own. According to a 2022 survey from the Sleep Foundation, among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own.
Children having their own rooms is unusual historically and somewhat peculiar to the US. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that popular parenting guides and childhood-development textbooks in the US began recommending splitting children up to give them “an independence within the family” that would build character and prepare them for adulthood. Experts suggested that separating children would lead to less fighting and better sleep habits. They also touted the benefits of children being able to control their space or to have time to themselves.
Only recently have these assumptions come under challenge. “Teenagers feel lonelier than ever,” according to Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Hunt, Gather, Parent and correspondent for NPR’s science desk, “and yet we’re walling them off in their own space.” Many parents today seem challenged to get their teens out of their rooms, so I’m not sure why having their own is so important. “A lot of cultures would say that, actually, sharing the room can help them get along better,” according to Doucleff.
I shared a bedroom with my brother until I was in sixth grade and he was in second. I think I can say we were never as close after that. There were other contributing factors, for sure, but I really value many memories of sharing a room with him, sleeping in bunk beds, talking past our bedtime. Of course, once I got my own room, which I’m sure I was thrilled about, I had time to myself. I could play my own music and talk on the phone, whenever I wanted, but we also had much less time when we were forced by circumstances to be alone in a room together.
In thinking about our own kids, our apartment has an area that could have been carved up into a small bedroom had it been necessary. That was always our relief valve, our “just in case.” It would come at the cost of common space, which I was desperate to hold onto, but it was there if we needed it. As it turned out, our boys never complained about the setup. It was actually our daughter who famously complained, “Why am I the only one who has to sleep alone?” I don’t know if our boys knew about our backup plan, but they never really pressed it. And before we knew it, our oldest was already thinking about college, and his brother would get his own room again.
Aside from whatever role the shared room played in their bonding, I think they learned practical skills as well. Whenever we travel, for instance, and there’s a double bed to share or a sofa (or cot) to allocate, the three of them divvy up the sleeping arrangements without any help or involvement from us. It typically involves a mathematically elegant solution and a rotation that seems far more complex than warranted, sometimes carrying over an indivisible leftover night on a single bed from a prior trip, but they all seem to revel in the process, pleased with its fairness.
For any number of reasons, people decide that zero, one, two, or more children is optimal for them. But while two children are preferred by half of Americans today, it hasn’t always been the norm. Just over 50 years ago, only 20 percent of Americans said the ideal family meant two or fewer children, while 71 percent said it meant three or more.
Bryan Caplan is an economist and a dad and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. In thinking about the optimal number of children for any given person or family, Caplan’s survey of the research on parenting suggests that many of the time- and money-intensive things that parents feel obligated to do don’t actually contribute much to the future success or happiness of their children. In other words, many parents make parenting unnecessarily arduous, focusing on things that matter less than they fear. So maybe, if they can afford to, they should consider having more kids.
Ultimately, I got over my anxieties, and we made the decision to have a third child. I used to joke, when the kids were younger, that three was one too many. Our society seems designed to comfortably accommodate families of four. From hotel rooms to taxis, the fifth person makes everything more complicated. When I was young, even though it was only my brother and I, the bench seat in our station wagon — not to mention, the “way back” — allowed kids to just be piled in the car like groceries or luggage.
These minor practical challenges aside, I know we had the right number of children for us. Having children sooner would have been too stressful with my wife’s medical training. And having our daughter when we did extended our active parenting of young children just enough for us to really savor the experience — and not too long that we were the oldest parents in every setting.
We have loved seeing our older children with their baby sister. We have loved seeing our youngest look up to her older brothers. We have loved having our lives filled with activities, performances, birthdays, and celebrations. We have loved seeing the bonds they have with each other and believe those bonds will survive their time at home. They have each brought something special to our family and the multiplier effects of having more than one have been higher than we could have imagined.
In the end, we are still running out of water and being buried in our own waste. We used to think these crises were because people were having too many children. Fast forward to today, and now it appears — perhaps — that it’s not high fertility that’s causing the degradation of future civilization, but rather, it’s the degradation of future civilization that’s causing our low fertility. Maybe if we can heal what ails us as a society, particularly our young people, we can also restore the optimism required to have more children. If there weren’t enough reason to do so already, this sounds like a good one.
