The cultural factors behind falling fertility rates
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
Fertility rates in the U.S. are falling for reasons that go beyond the economic.
Why it matters: The demographic makeup of a country helps decide its future, but it also alters its present.
- A country with fewer young children is one that will likely be culturally less hospitable to parents, which in turn could reinforce declining fertility rates.
By the numbers: 24.6 million Americans are under the age of 6.
- That's the same number as in 1962, but whereas in that year, young children made up more than 13% of the population, today they comprise a little more than 7%.
Between the lines: The reasons behind falling fertility rates are many, from delayed or nonexistent marriages to changing life priorities to lack of financial assistance — a factor that won't be helped by the reduced provisions for paid family leave in the latest iteration of President Biden's Build Back Better plan.
- But another reason is a changing cultural climate around children in many parts of the U.S.
Context: In a recent piece for The Week, Stephanie H. Murray outlined the "cultural weight dangling from the yoke of modern American parenthood," as parents of young children try to navigate a country that seems increasingly unsympathetic to their offspring.
- As young children become rarer, the burden of caring for them becomes heavier — and thanks to the U.S.'s paltry family support system, that burden is largely borne by the parents themselves.
- In another recent article, the writer Suzy Weiss profiled members of Gen Z who are so dedicated to the childless life — whether out of personal preference or concern about a climate apocalypse — that they've decided to undergo sterilization.
Our thought bubble: In any normally functioning market, a shortage of something will induce efforts to increase demand — but that only happens if people actually want the good in question.
- That increasingly doesn't seem to be the case in much of the U.S., and especially among young people in their prime childbearing years.
- Gen Z has a sense that “humans were a mistake," Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist at North Dakota State University, told Weiss.
The bottom line: Politics and economics matter to fertility, but cultural factors may outweigh it all.
