I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the declining birth rate, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
In a wide cross-section of countries, fewer women are having kids. There’s widespread fear over what this means for the future, but too many commentators treat this as a strictly economic issue without delving into the cultural reasons for it. The answers should be obvious, to anyone who takes the time to think about it: soaring inequality that makes child care increasingly unaffordable for working parents; women’s healthcare bans that directly threaten the lives of anyone who’s pregnant; cultural reasons which mean fewer men than ever are willing to be dependable partners.
Are we locked into an unstoppable downward spiral? Or is there still time to turn this trend around?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
According to CDC data, the U.S. fertility rate in 2024 ticked down to an all-time low of 1.599 children per woman.
It’s not only the U.S. that’s in this situation; it’s a worldwide trend. Declining birth rates and aging populations in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia are a well-studied phenomenon. However, the birth rate is also declining in middle-income and developing countries like Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Egypt and Sri Lanka.
Fertility keeps falling faster than demographers’ estimates, forcing them to revise their projections downward year after year. While previous projections forecast that the world population would start to shrink by the 2080s, it may now begin by 2055. Possibly even sooner.
I read the whole piece on OnlySky. Given the people saying they want IVF, I think fertility is declining a bit from environmental pollutants. But that’s not the only issue, or perhaps even the biggest issue.
I think you hit on the problems, and they’re not new. Ever since the 1980s, it takes two middle-class incomes to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Children add to a family’s expenses and stressors, particularly since things that used to be handled by the school or the village are now the parents’ responsibility. One small example; I remember showing up to school in the 1960s with a couple of pencils, a marbled tablet of paper, and a box of crayons–the school provided the rest. When I had kids, the back to school lists were always bizarre, including paper products (exactly 7.5 paper plates? WHY?), ziplock bags, tissues and even toilet paper. As a child, I roamed over hill and dale with friends and nobody thought anything of it. In summers and on no-school days, we were pushed out of the house after breakfast and told to come in when the streetlights came on. Now, a parent letting their child walk a few blocks home from school is looking to face child-welfare agents. The school day is 6 hours while the adult workday is 8 hours. The school year is 180 days while the adult work year is 348 days. And daycare is unaffordable. The pressures on parents–most usually, the mother–are unrelenting. A woman would really, really want to face these issues to voluntarily go through it.
Society is downright hostile to women in general and mothers in particular. The medical profession (particularly ob/gyn medical professionals) has never been particularly safe for women, and it’s gotten even worse now, when doctors are being forced into making the choice of providing care to a pregnant woman and losing their license and going to jail, or just standing by and watching the woman die in front of them from a preventable health crisis. Just recently I heard a statistic that 9 out of 10 pregnant women will have some sort of pregnancy complication. One of my neighbors sardonically brags about giving birth in the car on the way to the hospital because she saved $30k (her proportion of the bill once insurance did its thing) by delivering her baby herself.
Yep. Also even for the men who aren’t blatantly sexist finding one who will do a fair share of the childrearing is unlikely. So having kids is basically signing up for an extra job
@1:
#shitholecountry
I’ve never had a job where i worked more than 330 days a year. For six years around when I got chartered i worked less than 300. But then I live in the civilised world. Why does anyone with any choice *visit* the US, much less live there? It sounds actively hostile to anyone who isn’t independently wealthy.
Well, crap. I mis-typed the work year–248, not 348. But the point is that the disconnect between the school schedule and an adult work schedule means that the parent (usually the mother) is constantly distracted and scrambling to find alternate and emergency child care. And the school calendar seems designed to frustrate parents–there are late starts and early dismissals galore, and snow days are ridiculous. I remember one day I’d had to shell out $40 in advance for a kindergarten field trip (kindergarten was 2 hours & 15 minutes–or, a “half-day”) and school was closed that day for snow. The temps never dropped below 50 degrees and it didn’t even rain.
And parent-teacher conferences are scheduled during the day when the kids are out of school now, whereas in the 1960s when many mothers didn’t work, they were in the evening. No children allowed at these conferences…but the child is home, and the parent is…at the school.
Also, the schools have offloaded much of the things they used to do to the parents to do at home. So, you’ve got two adults who work all day–often staggered hours so someone is home when the kids are–and then the evening is spent doing homework. I was shocked when my then-kindergartener–who was in class 2 hours and 15 minutes a day–was coming home with a full 2 hours of homework. They couldn’t cover the material in class, you see, because the school day was so short, but the kids needed to know the information for the year-end testing. So not only is the parent currently at home with the kids (usually the mother) taking care of household chores and administrative things that couldn’t get done during the day because she was working all day, but she must also get the kids fed and bathed and the homework taught–because a 5-year-old needs supervision. Invariably, the child also has some kind of school enrichment activity and needs a box of toothpicks and some colored tissue paper–which they will tell you about at 8 pm. Now try to fit in sports, etc. in the day. There just aren’t enough hours.
I had kids in the late 1980s thinking I knew what I was getting into, but I was astounded at just how difficult it had become from the 1960s when the stay-at-home mothers waved goodbye to the kids in the morning and had the whole day to themselves. My kids are adults and married now, but neither has had kids of their own yet because the physical and mental cost is just too high. They lived through the craziness of the years of running around and they’re not sure they want to live like that.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am in the USA because all of my grandparents gave up all their possessions and connections with family to move here, and life worked out brilliantly for them. My parents’ lives were brilliant as well until their very old age, when their health is what you would expect of the very elderly. I am in the sandwich generation dealing with parents and kids, with friends, family, community and a support system built carefully over the decades. When Trump was elected, I explored emigrating, but the only countries willing to take someone near retirement age are worse than the USA.
I’ve lived in England, twice, for 3 year tours apiece. What I’ve noticed about there is that they seem to be stuck culturally in the 1950s where women are 100% responsible for everything–house, kids, job, etc., and there’s so much sexism in general society.
I’ve seen discussion of this on other sites, and one of the things that becomes clear is… this is far from a single-cause situation. The birth rate decline is happening in countries all over the world, and while ‘it’s too expensive to have children’ is certainly one of the major contributing factors in many of those countries, this is also happening in countries that have much better family support and social safety nets than the U.S. has ever had.
‘People are too busy staring at their cell phones’ is another ‘one cause fits all’ that gets brought up, despite the fact that this is happening in countries with massively varying levels of infrastructure for that.
Basically I’m not saying anybody is wrong, just that I don’t think there’s one universal cause for this everywhere, and acting like there’s one sure cause that needs to be fixed is not necessarily going to solve the issue. (It may solve other issues, sure: making sure there is support for families that do have children is a good idea regardless of its effect on the global population long-term.)
There’s also the fact that, yeah, the world as a whole could do with a lower population. We’d be causing a lot less of a mess if there weren’t so many of us. Part of the problem, of course, is that the capitalist system doesn’t deal well with shrinking markets.
@jenorafeuer: agreed 100%, and also want to highlight your point that the world is not suffering from a lack of people. Covid removed several millions from the gene pool, but that’s nothing compared to the 8 billion+
Yeah, it seems that we have enough people. It’ll be a while before we have to worry about human extinction (if you’re inclined to worry about that)
I wonder what the gender distribution of people freaking out about this is? Feels like i mostly see it from cis men, which makes me wonder if this is about cis men’s power?
If less people with uteruses are having children and people want them to, that gives the uterus havers more power
I remember that the population was supposed to peak at 10 billion during the 2050s. There have been a bunch of revisions since then, ranging from 8-12 billion and anywhere from the 2030s to the 2080s, but it currently it’s back on track to 10 billion in the 2050s again. So the current 8 Bil isn’t the end of population growth, and it’ll probably be decades before it gets back down to 8 Bil, so it’s not like there’s going to be an immediate population crisis.
Well, actually there sort of is. When the Boomers start retiring en masse, which won’t be long now, then that will cause capitalistic growth to slow down… and maybe even grind to a halt well before the population peaks. Power will start to flow back into the hands of the workers. Even if baby-breeding factories fired up tomorrow, it would take decades to make any real difference, and the big money people rarely operate on a timeline of decades. That’s only a problem for the average person because the ultra-rich are going to make it everyone’s problem.
I suspect that this is one of the reasons why tech companies are throwing billions at AI development. Some of them are desperately hoping that you can create an ever-growing economy with less human participation, somehow.
(And then there are always the racists who are whining that their race is going extinct, because they’re being outbred and/or unable to prevent other people from “losing their genetic legacy” by producing mixed-race children. That’s a different subject.)
@Snowberry, I have a small nitpick with what you said: the very youngest Boomers are ~61 and the oldest are at or near their 80s, so the biggest portion of Boomers has already retired.
I also agree that the population of humans is by no means bottlenecked. You can make the argument that there are far too many people on the planet now.
Yes, but most of the Baby Boomers who I know are still working even if they’ve hit retirement age, because they can’t afford to retire. Maybe that’s just a US thing, but I’m assuming that the majority actually hasn’t quite yet.
Though if I’m wrong about that on a global level (or in general) then that does make an attempt to make an ever-expanding economy with less human participation even more urgent from the point of view of the ultra-rich, assuming that’s part of what’s happening.
@Snowberry: I’m also in the US exclusively since 2005 (former military). Maybe it’s the cohort I’m around in this particular geographic area, but most Boomers I know are retired. Most Boomers I know also have nice pensions to go along with their Social Security. GenX was the first generation to miss out on companies with pensions because by the time we started working, companies participated in 401k schemes–aka “gamble with your future–the market can (and does!) go down”.
In my career field, people just a couple of years older than I am who worked for the same company I do got pensions, while my cohort is looking at market lows and Trump getting rid of Social Security.
Don’t lose sight of the basics. For population, the core basic is birth control. During my lifetime, women became free for the first time in history. Things are getting restructured because women are free to make choices that don’t involve children. Note that no posting above has a projection of how this all comes out, and that social/political pushback does not involve recognition of our changed world.
A decline in birth rates among Hainan Black-Crested Gibbons would be really really bad.
On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing why I should be alarmed by declining birth rates among homo sapiens. We aren’t an endangered species. We’re a “least concern” species.
https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/136584/4313662