Experts warn that the United States may be following Japan’s worrying population decline after the Asian nation-state released new shocking data.
Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) recently revealed that a third of 18-year-old women may never have children. The island country recorded a population of 126.15 million in 2020 but that number is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070, IPSS said.
“With the rising cost of living, I don’t think people feel they can afford to or comfortably say they want to have children,” 23-year-old Anna Tanaka told Reuters.
The birthrate has been declining for more than four decades as the desire for marriage and parenting has faded and financial worries have grown, the outlet reported.
Miho Iwasawa, the IPSS’s director of population dynamics research, blamed the population decline on the fact that people were marrying later in life and having less–or no–children.
More families opting to have fewer children may be creating a cycle of smaller families.
Parents who have fewer children are able to spend more on each child increasing the average cost of raising a child deterring more people from having children, Takuya Hoshino, senior economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute explained to Reuters.
As Japan looks to incentivize population growth amid worrying economic decline, experts warn that the US is experiencing a similar cultural shift leading to a continued population decline.
Data from the US Census Bureau showed that the population grew just 0.4 percent in 2022, an increase from 2021 but a much lower amount than every other year of the past few hundred years.
The number of births in the US has continued to decline for decades as nearly half of American women under 45 are currently childless. The number of biological fathers in the same age range also dipped.
Some attribute this to the fact that Americans are choosing to marry later or not at all.
The median age of first marriage has increased over the last 50 years, from 23 in 1970 to about 30 in 2021 for men, and from 21 in 1970 to 28 in 2021 for women, the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project found.
On top of that, a record number of 40-year-olds in the US have never been married, and most of them are living alone.
And a staggering 21% of millennials and 7% of Gen Z are not planning to get married with the majority saying they simply aren’t interested in marriage, according to a study conducted by the Thriving Center of Psychology.
This marks a new peak in a decades-long trend.
Advancements in egg-freezing and fertility treatments have allowed women to delay child-bearing and become a parent while single- but the quieting of their ticking biological clock has also allowed some the time to build fulfilling lives and come to the conclusion that they don’t want children.
A Match.com survey found a 19% dip in singles under 40 who said it was important to have a partner who wanted to have kids compared to 2017. The decreased interest in having children was “most pronounced among women, with only 56% now saying it is important to find a partner who wants children,” according to the research.
Younger generations have become particularly disinterested in childrearing with 37% of non-parents younger than 40 revealing that it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, according to the Pew Research Center.
Of those planning to remain childless, the majority (60%) said they simply don’t want to become parents.
Those who do want children are choosing to do it later and have smaller families, another study from the Pew Research Center reported. In 2021, the average woman gave birth for the first time at 27.3 years old– up from 25.6 years old in 2011. Those who did give birth had an average of two children in 2020, which is much smaller than compared to the average family having three or more children in the late 1970s, the study noted.
Other experts have also attributed the declining birth rate to women earning higher levels of education and income, obtaining greater and longer career paths, changing family values, financial concerns, improved access to contraception, relationship instability and climate concerns- the list could go on.
“The challenge is that no single cause can be identified for the declining birthrate,” Japan’s IPSS’s director said.