People are having fewer babies than ever before. Birthrates have fallen for more than 15 years, and last month, the United States announced a record-low total fertility rate of 1.62 babies per woman in 2023.
Yet, the Social Security Administration, in its newest calculations about the future of the trust fund, assumed the birth rate would climb over the next two decades and stabilize at 1.9.
This assumption — that low birthrates will self-correct — is a common one among economists, but all recent history around the world points in the opposite direction. The past few decades have shown us that low birth rates cause even lower birth rates.
A culture with fewer children, it turns out, is a culture less welcoming to children.
Why? There are a dozen reasons, ranging from macroeconomics to infrastructure to cultural norms.
One way to understand the mechanism of downward spiral fertility is to study the subcultures that are resisting the trend — where more babies lead to more babies. In these places, pregnancy seems to be contagious.
Israel or Utah are two such places where larger families seem endemic. Obviously, the values of Judaism and the Church of Latter Day Saints nudge women and men to be more open to parenthood and large families, but even non-Jews and non-Mormons in these places are abnormally fecund.
Secular Jews in Israel have lower birthrates than the more religious Israelis, but with a birthrate of 1.96 in 2020, they still have far higher birthrates than the average European woman.
Economist Natalie Gochnour from the University of Utah likewise says the Catholics in Utah have a higher birthrate than the Catholics in any other state.
“It’s in the air,” Gochnour says. If you look closely, you can see the vectors of this communicable condition.
Kemp Mill is a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., anchored by two modern Orthodox synagogues. Kemp Mill looks very different from other neighborhoods in Montgomery County, not only because the residents eschew driving on Saturday but also because families of six, seven, or more are a common sight.
“Most people that I know in our age group have three or four,” one mother named Ava told me during Purim festivities in Kemp Mill. (Ava asked I not use her last name.) “And then there’s another group, and they all have five, and they’re all friends with each other, and five is a great number. Five is just what they do.”
But we can get more granular. If you pass through Kemp Mill on a weekend or a summer afternoon, you will see little gangs of children roaming the neighborhood and this hints at the feedback effects. The more children roaming the streets, the easier it is for any individual parent to let his or her children roam the streets, which makes parenting easier and makes having a little platoon of your own more imaginable.
Also, the more neighbors and friends you have who have a toddler and a newborn, the easier it is to have a semblance of a social life while you have a toddler and a newborn. Coffees planned around naptime replace lengthy boozy brunches, and playground picnics replace dinners at fancy restaurants.
On a larger scale, places with more children are more likely to accommodate children and their parents, culturally and physically. In childful places, local governments, community institutions, schools, and religious congregations are more likely to build more family-friendly infrastructure, host more activities for children, and extend more consideration to parents.
This is part of Israel’s story. New housing developments typically come with a kindergarten and a playground. It’s normal to bring your children out to restaurants, and no parent apologizes or hands out goodie bags with drink tickets or earplugs from bringing their toddler on a plane flight.
This is how more children beget more children. Above-normal birthrates make places more family-friendly.
The modern wealthy world is mostly seeing the opposite feedback loop. On a basic level, if your friends don’t have children, you’re less likely to have children.
Back in 1993, most Americans in their early 30s (60%) had a child in their household. Nowadays, according to Pew Research, it’s about one in four (27%). This means that having children in your 20s today, especially in college-educated circles, could derail your social life because none of your friends are having children.
South Korea, with the lowest birth rate in the world (below 1.0), shows the more systemic ways in which a culture with fewer children becomes less welcoming to children. Restaurants, museums, and other public places across South Korea have declared themselves “no-kids zones,” as the Times reported last year. The government has created massive benefits for parents and has tried desperately to promote marriage and family formation through public policy, but a culture that is anti-child is going to get fewer children.
An overwhelming majority of South Koreans approve of these no-children zones, which is no surprise: A culture where adults are accustomed to going through their day without seeing children is one where adults will have less tolerance for miniature humans who lack refined control of their speaking volume and their bodily fluids.
When institutions built for families disappear, it creates a feedback loop. In many New England towns, for instance, decades of low birthrates caused falling student populations, which forced governments to close and consolidate schools. A town with no high school or where the sole elementary school requires a 45-minute bus ride is not family-friendly and so will see fewer births.
The hospital in New Milford, Connecticut, saw its prized Family Birthing Center close in 2012 due to collapsing birthrates. Then the school board decided in 2014 to close a local elementary school.
Some people are unbothered by America’s low birth rate because we are blessed with many immigrants, and our population isn’t falling yet. But the last 30 years have shown us that the decline in baby-making won’t stop on its own. Accepting our low birthrates is accepting a world less welcoming to children — and that’s an indictment of our culture.
So what can we do to help young folks start families and to help young families grow?
There’s a limit to what public policy can do to directly influence family-planning decisions, but there are some simple steps Congress, state, and local governments could take to start the momentum rolling in the pro-baby direction. For starters, Congress should expand the Child Tax Credit, which has shrunk by 15% thanks to the inflation of the past few years. The CTC is an example of the only sort of policy intervention proven to drive up birthrates: direct cash transfers to parents.
Congress also needs to reconsider policies that shift money from the family-formation period of life (one’s 20s and 30s) to later in life. The tax break for mortgage interest is an example: It drives up home prices and then slowly pays back homeowners over time.
The work of supporting children, parents, and would-be parents, however, will mostly have to be done on a smaller scale.
Local governments can reduce the burden on parents by laying down sidewalks and crosswalks and building playgrounds. If we make our cities and towns more walkable and bikable for children, we make it easier for children to wander the neighborhood and liberate both parents and children from the tyranny of car dependence — make more neighborhoods like Kemp Mill where children roam free. Supporting free-range parenting will reduce the time “cost” of each child, and thus help parents have a second, third, or fourth child.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Employers also need to play a central role in supporting parents. Bosses need to make it clear through word and deed that family comes first. Give workers the flexibility to work from home and create more jobs that allow Mom or Dad to be home at 3 p.m.
Governments, employers, and community institutions will need to experiment with what works because this Baby Bust is a new problem. Everyone with political, economic, and cultural influence should ask how they can support parents and adults who want children because otherwise, we will continue to have fewer children, which will make us even less welcoming to children.