Some conservatives love to frame the decline in fertility rates in the United States as an example of the erosion of family values.
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was recently criticized for saying in 2021 that the nation was governed by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over those ridiculous status games in D.C. and New York.”
Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to seek pleasure, drink all night, and go to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure instead of fulfillment and having a family.”
But researchers studying trends in reproductive health describe a different scenario. The decision to forgo having children is likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one, fertility rates are declining across the developed world, not just here.
According to them, the reasons for the decline include several social factors—such as rising childcare costs, increasingly expensive housing, and decreasing optimism about the future—that make it seem increasingly unsustainable to raise children in the United States.
Fertility rates have generally been falling in the United States since the end of the baby boom in the mid-1960s. This decline accelerated after 2008, a trend that has been largely attributed to the Great Recession, said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, to The New York Times.
Last year, the total fertility rate fell to 1,616.5 births per 1,000 women, a historic low that is far below the rate needed to maintain population size, 2,100 births per 1,000 women.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that an increasing number of adults said they likely would never have children. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly half of U.S. counties reported more deaths than births.
Moreover, the average age at which Americans are marrying and starting families has increased, and this is likely contributing to the decline in fertility. In 2023, the average age of women marrying for the first time was 28—about six years older than in the 1980s.
The average age at which women give birth to their first child has also increased significantly, from 20 years during the baby boom to 27 in 2022.
Immigration to the United States helps offset population loss. However, experts fear that the shrinking generations could lead to school closures, stalled economic development, and social programs like Social Security facing even greater deficits.
Notably, studies on the reasons behind the decline in fertility do not reveal a drastic change in the desire to have children.
Many Americans in their teens and 20s still report wanting to have two children, said Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. The fact that many of these adults are not realizing this goal likely means that external factors are making it harder to become parents, she said.
Research data suggest that many young adults want to reach certain economic milestones before having children—they want to buy a home, pay off student debt, or comfortably afford childcare, said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a family demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to the NYT.
Reaching these milestones has become increasingly difficult, she said, as mortgage rates have risen sharply and childcare costs have skyrocketed.
As fewer women choose to stay home to raise children, the absence of policies that support working families—such as paid maternity leave and stable childcare—may also be leading couples to believe they are not prepared to be parents, Dr. Guzzo added.
Consequently, many parents even want to have children but keep postponing. Time passes, and so does age, leaving the desire to have children too late to happen.
Furthermore, the choice of whether or not to have children may also be affected by how optimistic people are about the future, she said.
A study conducted by sociologists in the Netherlands found that people who said they thought the prospects for the next generation were “much worse than today” were less likely to become parents.
And there are many reasons why young people may be pessimistic: climate change, frequent gun violence, the recent pandemic, and especially the extremely high cost of living.
In short, the decline in fertility rates has much more complex reasons than the simplistic argument from the Republican vice-presidential candidate that women do not want to have children and start families to remain “hot” and unencumbered in pursuit of status and pleasure.
Source: The New York Times