The Real Reason People Don’t Have Kids

Facts of the so-called The fertility crisis is well-publicized: Birth rates in the United States have been declining for nearly two decades, and other wealthy countries are doing the same. Among those who propose solutions to reverse the trend, the prevailing view is that if only the government offered parents more financial support, birth rates would start rising again.

What if this wisdom is wrong?

In 1960, American women had an average of 3.6 children; in 2023, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have in her lifetime) was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Meanwhile, childlessness rates are rising: in 2018, more than one in seven women ages 40 to 44 had no biological children, up from one in 10 in 1976. And according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, the share of American adults under 50 who say they probably will never have children rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, to 47 percent. In mainstream American discourse, explanations for these trends tend to focus on economic constraints: people are choosing not to have children because of the high cost of childcare, the lack of parental leave, and the financial penalties that mothers face. Some policymakers (and concerned citizens) believe that costly government interventions could help change people’s minds.

But data from other parts of the world, including countries with generous family policies, suggest otherwise. Every OECD country except Israel now has a fertility rate below replacement, and the rate of decline over the past decade has exceeded demographers’ expectations. In 2022, the average fertility rate for European Union countries was 1.46; in 2023, South Korea’s was 0.72, the lowest in the world.

South Korea has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years on policies aimed at boosting fertility, including monthly stipends for parents, extended parental leave, and subsidized prenatal care—yet its overall fertility rate has fallen by 25 percent during that time. France spends a larger percentage of its GDP on families than any other OECD country, yet last year saw its lowest birth rate since World War II. Even the Nordic countries, with their long-standing welfare states, childcare guarantees, and extended parental leave policies, are seeing fertility rates fall sharply.

Policy changes that make life easier and cheaper for parents are valuable in their own right. But so far, such improvements have failed to change the low fertility rates in most countries. This suggests another, under-discussed reason why people don’t have children—one that, I’ve come to believe, has little to do with politics and everything to do with a deep but unmeasurable human need.

Read: To have or not to have children

This need is for meaningIn trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns about finances, climate change, political instability, and even potential war. But listening carefully to people’s stories, I’ve detected a larger thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and the meaning of existence. Many of the current generation of young adults don’t seem entirely sure about their own purpose or the purpose of humanity in general, let alone the purpose of having a child. Perhaps for many who lack a clear sense of purpose, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidies the government might offer.

In his 1960s work on Family economics, Nobel laureate Gary Becker theorized that household decisions, including fertility choices, could be analyzed through the lens of economics. More precisely, children could be likened to goods like houses or cars; the number of children parents had was related to what they could afford in terms of time and money. By this logic, making goods cheaper—expanding household budgets with subsidies, career-return guarantees, and other financial carrots—should be enough to induce parents to have more children.

Governments have generally stuck to that assumption when enacting pro-natal policies. But two new books examining why people have or don’t have children—works that approach the issue in a very different way—suggest that this method is flawed.

Read: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?

IN Hanna’s Children: Women Quietly Facing Childbirth ShortagesCatherine Ruth Pakaluk, an economist and Catholic mother of eight, compiles interviews with 55 women from across the United States who have five or more children—hers is a qualitative study of Americans who are happily escaping the norm of low birth rates. What unites the author and her unusual subjects (only about 5 percent of mothers in the United States have five or more children) is their shared conviction that children are an unconditional good and that raising them is a meaningful activity.

Then there are those who are much less sure. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and ChoiceAnastasia Berg, lecturer and editor at Pointand Rachel Wiseman, an editor at the same magazine, bring together literature, philosophy, and antinatalist texts to grapple with the question of whether having children is worth it at all. It’s a decision that’s been described as “paralyzing” and “anxiety-inducing,” and one that should be approached with trepidation (even if the authors find individual clarity by the end). But their book echoes Pakaluk’s views in one striking respect: Both works share the view that current policies encouraging people to have children are missing a key element. “As appealing as economics may be as a solution to the puzzle of growing ambivalence about having children, it’s biased at best,” Berg and Wiseman write. Pakaluk notes, “Monetary incentives and tax breaks won’t convince people to give up their lives. People will do it for God, for their families, and for their future children.” In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—unless there’s a deeper conviction that doing so makes sense.

In many circles, such certainty has become elusive. Berg and Wiseman do dwell on its opposite: anxiety about whether having children is a good thing or an imposition, a decision that might rob a person of individual fulfillment or even make the world worse in the long run—for example, by contributing to climate change, overpopulation, or the continuation of regressive gender norms. “Becoming a parent,” they write, “can feel less like a transition and more like jumping off a cliff.”

The authors touch on the standard narratives about why young people postpone or forgo having children—financial worries, difficulty finding a partner, fears that having children will be incompatible with their careers—but they describe them as “external,” borrowing a term from family therapist and author Ann Davidman, rather than as a primary concern. One interviewee notes that if money weren’t an obstacle, she would be “at least neutral” about having a child, which is still far from positive. Instead, more existential worries emerge, pointing to a loss of stabilizing self-confidence among recent generations or the lack of an overarching framework (religious or otherwise) that can help steer people toward a “good” life. “The old frameworks, whatever they may be, seem to no longer apply,” Berg and Wiseman write. “And the new ones give us almost no answers.”

Read: Two ways to increase the birth rate in the country

The mothers Pakaluk describes approach having children with far less ambivalence. As one mother told her, “I just have to trust that there’s a purpose to it all.” The lives of the mothers she interviewed are based on a sincere faith in providence, in which their religious faith often plays an important role. These mothers have confidence that their children can thrive without the best things in life, that family members can help each other, and that financial and other problems can be trusted to resolve themselves. And while there are obvious concerns—the women describe concerns about maintaining their physical health, their professional status, and their identity—they aren’t crucial. Ann, a mother of six, tells Pakaluk that she doesn’t feel “obligated” to have a large family, but that she sees “the extra children as a greater blessing than the travel, than the career… I hope we can still do some of those things, but I think this is more important. Or the greater good.”

It’s a seemingly simple statement—and it reinforces the idea that if people are to have children, they need more than a sense that human life is valuable. “It is not just the possibility of good, but its reality fuels our deepest desire to secure a human future,” Berg and Wiseman propose. Yet we live in a time when even those who are confident about having children are sometimes treated with skepticism. The claim that parenthood can be a positive experience is somewhat of a stretch in some circles tactless“To claim that one’s life is good,” the authors write, “risks being seen as either entitled or simply hopelessly naive.”

Contrast this with the attitude of Hannah, a mother of seven, who tells Pakaluk that each new child “benefits the family and the world.” She and other mothers exemplify what happens when meaning is deeply internalized: Many children tend to evoke—and, these women say, bring joy.

Of course, joy is a difficult thing for any policy to make promises. Government agencies rely on statistics—income, years, “productivity”—to justify interventions and tend to overlook the unmeasurable. Intangible incentives like purpose, belonging, and love don’t always seem rational. As Robert F. Kennedy said in a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, less than three months before his assassination, “The gross domestic product does not take into account the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the enjoyment of their play…. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, nor our wisdom nor our knowledge nor our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except what makes life worthwhile.”

Kennedy essentially urged Americans to seek meaning, suggesting that only in this way would they have the strength to fight despair. But “meaning” is not something that governments can easily provide; it usually comes from unity in the face of undesirable crises (wars, pandemics) or from widely enforced norms (religious, cultural) that many no longer share. (This may be a clue as to why Israel has bucked the trend toward low birth rates: the religious edict “be fruitful and multiply” is an accepted part of the national culture, and having children is seen as contributing to a common goal.)

Politically speaking, pointing to abstractions without easy solutions has very few advantages—and often significant disadvantages. If falling birth rates can be attributed to a loss of meaning, the question arises whether there is any government solution to the problem of falling fertility. People debating whether to have children seem to be looking for reassurance that life is good, that more life would therefore be better, and that help will come if needed. Government policy can help with this last part. The first two reassurances are likely to come only from another source.

Hanna’s Children: Stories of Women Who Quietly Face Childbirth Deprivation

By Catherine Pakaluk

What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice

By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman