Excerpts
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With their stable jobs and supportive marriage, the Riveras are exactly the kind of people demographers would expect to be well on their way to parenthood today. Researchers who study population trends have shown that births tend to rise when economies are on the upswing, and more recently have proposed a relationship between gender roles and the birthrate: Very high levels of equality in the home and in society are associated with more births. (The same goes for very low levels of gender equality.) Yet in most places around the world, birthrates have marched steadily downward for the past two decades, even where economies have grown and working women’s male partners handled more household tasks. The Riveras may point to why.
The collective reluctance to procreate is perhaps most glaring in the Nordic countries. With their stable economies, strong social safety nets, robust family policies and equitable gender relations, they maintained relatively high birthrates through the early 2000s. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.
This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families. Government support for parents can help, but overall, people are having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits; moreover, the trend holds among those who are struggling to make ends meet and among those who, like the Riveras, have advanced degrees and salaried jobs. What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.
The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.
Even declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.” Gen Z-ers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.
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In one study, Professor Vignoli and his co-authors found that though people’s current job situation — whether they had long-term or only temporary employment — influenced their decision to become a parent, equally influential was their sense of their future prospects, and whether, if this job went away, they could find another at comparable pay. That sense is a function of both real-world conditions and individual temperament — “resilience toward unexpected outcomes,” as Professor Vignoli puts it.
To understand current population shifts, then, we must look further than just the indicators that researchers in other contexts have referred to as the shadow of the past — is someone employed? Married? College-educated? We must also consider what have been called the shadows of the future.
Doing so helps to explain why certain longstanding patterns are beginning to change. American women with less education tend to have more children than their more educated peers. That was true in the era before birth control became available and marriage ceased to be effectively compulsory, but it was also true afterward, when women had more choices. Researchers theorized that motherhood actually reduced uncertainty for young low-income mothers, even in their precarious circumstances, because it gave them a defined and valued social role, with clear responsibilities and an identifiable path.
The decline in births after the Great Recession affected women of all education levels, but between 2007 and 2016, it was steeper among American women without college degrees, whose births dropped 12 percent below projections, according to an analysis by the demographer Lyman Stone. That’s an estimated 3.1 million “missing” births in that cohort alone. Among women with graduate degrees, births dropped by just 7 percent from 2007 levels. Reproduction fell most precipitously among nonwhite women, especially Hispanic and Native American women, who earn less, on average, than white women. As with any sweeping social change, more than one factor is at work, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the anxiety of bringing a child into such an uncertain world may increasingly outweigh the appeal of motherhood.
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Dr. Comolli has been studying how economic uncertainty rippled through the social sphere, eroding social trust and spurring the rise of radical right-wing parties, and how those changes in turn affect fertility. In Sweden, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats have talked about protecting the family and increasing child allowances. But Dr. Comolli found that in towns and cities where the party was gaining popularity, birthrates actually fell. Highly educated women, whom the researchers described as most likely to feel alienated by their neighbors’ support for the radical right, were especially likely to forgo having a child.
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Solving the problem with one-off pronatalist gestures such as a tax break for having children has proved futile time and time again. To truly make a change, policymakers must take a “holistic approach to making lives and systems that are more conducive to having and raising children, and more conducive to living a happy and secure and healthy life as a person,” said Sarah Hayford, who directs the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. “You can’t address the parenting part without addressing the secure life part.” That takes structural change.
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