It’s a story you can almost put your watch on: Every few months, new data or a new report will show that the birth rate in a country or region is too low to support economic growth, and efforts to convince people to have failed to have babies.
It’s a story that in many ways is made for the interpreter, and one that I, as a busy working parent, find myself in the thick of. That may explain why analyzing this issue makes me feel teetering on the edge of a swirling vortex that contains everything from the pressures of modern capitalism to my own stress about what to feed my kids tonight.
I usually stop at that point – as a busy working parent I don’t have time to drag myself out of vortices – but today I’m lucky, even if I’m steaming up at the end of the week. Let’s get into it.
Recently, the story of demographic demise has been linked to China, whose population is now officially shrinking, setting up a crisis with global consequences. But you could write a similar story about the United States, where birth rates fell sharply last year, or about a number of other countries whose governments offered cash bonuses, tax benefits, paid leave and other benefits to convince people to have more children. The result is almost always the same: the figures hardly deviate.
Even in countries like Sweden, where generous social benefits and government financial incentives managed to halt a fall in the birth rate, the effects have been modest, my colleagues Andrew Jacobs and Francesca Paris wrote in the result this week.
This is what is often referred to as the “second demographic transition.” Once a country has reached a certain level of economic development, fertility rates often fall close to or below the levels needed to sustain the population. (That number is usually estimated at about 2.1 children per woman.)
There are a few related explanations for what’s going on. The first is a gender story: As women have more opportunities outside the home and are more inclined to pursue careers, less time remains for parenting, making it difficult to have more than one or two children.
Many government programs that provide paid parental leave and subsidized childcare are designed to facilitate the gender balance between work and parenthood. Swedish parental leave policy Encourages fathers to take time offand encourages men to take on a greater share of parenting responsibilities.
The second explanation for the declining birth rates is similar: because modern life is so expensive, especially in urban areas where there are often well-paid jobs, families cannot survive on a single income. If both parents work, they are less likely to have time to care for several children. Having another child could then force one parent out of the workforce, with catastrophic consequences for family finances.
The third explanation, which is getting a little less attention, is the rise of “intensive parenting,” where parents invest enormous amounts of time and money in their children to set them up for success in a brutally competitive world. In this view, it is the children themselves who are priceless.
All these factors can overlap. When I last wrote on this issue, Matthias Doepke, a professor at the London School of Economics, told me in 2021 that the countries with the lowest fertility, such as Singapore and South Korea, tend to be those where educational competition is exceptionally high and where the burden of childcare especially hard on women.
But while all of those explanations seem essentially correct to me, it seems as if the anemicness of statistics omits something more difficult to measure than house prices or education costs.
That something, I suspect, is probably also why writing on this topic seems so emotionally charged to me: the way all that pressure puts a price tag on relationships and community together.
Education is an investment that gives families an economic boost, but school is also where children and parents make friends, develop interests, and collaborate on meaningful projects in ways that are valuable, even if they never lead to increased income.
Expensive childcare isn’t just the price of two-parent careers — it’s an attempt to replace the networks of grandparents and extended families who are now often too distant, too busy, or not healthy enough to care for their grandchildren.
Add it all up and you have a financial and emotional balance that many parents dread, an insecure sense that the whole work and family edifice is about to fall. That helps explain why declining fertility has been so hard to reverse, despite the efforts of so many governments: it’s not one thing, it’s everything.