Americans Are Having Fewer Children Later in Life

 

In any developed nation, it takes 2.1 live births per adult woman to achieve replacement value. The global average is 2.4 such births. Developed nations, those most able to afford to nurture and raise children, have the lowest birth rates on earth.

The fertility rate in Europe is relatively low, with no country above 2.0, and has declined in recent years. Several factors could drive this trend, including socioeconomic incentives to delay childbearing, a decline in the desired number of children, a lack of child care, and changing gender roles. The fertility rate in the overall Euro area is 1.5.” WorldPopulationReview.com looking at 2021.

Countries like Norway (1.6) and Italy (1.3) are particularly low, but the United States, at 1.76 is also very low. For population-driven economic growth, these nations increasingly rely on immigration, but recent pandemic realities and xenophobic political trends have pushed against this particular form of growth, even as conflict and drought seem to push such population movement forward. Japan, with a birth rate at 1.4 and a very obstructionist view to immigration, expects to have experienced a 30% population contraction by 2050.

Since the United States is squarely in the middle of this developed world contraction, the question has to be “why?” Writing an OpEd for the June 28th New York Times, journalist lawyer whose work focuses on gender and politics, Jill Filipovic, starts the discussion with the conflicting conservative and liberal perspectives: “For conservatives, the fact that more women are putting off parenthood or forgoing it entirely is evidence of a dangerous decline in traditional family values. In this framing, women have been manipulated into putting their educational and professional aspirations ahead of motherhood, contributing to a broader cultural breakdown.

“Liberals make the (better) case that birth declines are clearly tied to policy, with potential mothers deterred by the lack of affordable child care and the absence of universal health care, adequate paid parental leave and other basic support systems. Couple that with skyrocketing housing prices, high rates of student loan debt and stagnant wages and it’s no surprise that so many women say: ‘Children? In this economy?’” A more detailed review also shows that the skew of US birth rates tells us that the states with the greatest urban populations, many with a heavy focus on technology and finance (also those states associated with the most expensive cost of living), have the lowest birth rates, as the above 2019 chart from the CDC illustrates.

Further, not only are American women giving birth less, but they are having their children later, on average at age 29 or later. Women having children in their 40s are no longer uncommon. Jill Filipovic continues her analysis: “But what if lower birthrates are a good thing? For a great many individual women, reconsidering motherhood doesn’t reflect hardship or unmet desire, but rather a new landscape of opportunity. As a country, we would be better off if we saw significant demographic changes as data points that can give us important clues about what people want, what they need and how we might improve their lives.

“Birthrates are declining among women in their 20s, ticking up slightly among women in their 30s and 40s and, as a New York Times analysis found, decreasing the most significantly in counties where employment is growing. In other words, the women who are driving this downturn are those who have the most advantage and the greatest range of choices, and whose prospects look brightest… 

“Further, while birthrates are dropping, the total percentage of women who are mothers has risen, in part thanks to older women, college-educated women and unmarried women being more likely to have a baby than they had been. Childbearing remains overwhelmingly the norm: 86 percent of American women ages 40 to 44 are mothers. Motherhood isn’t on the decline so much as motherhood is delayed, and families with one or two children are ascendant.

“Thanks to feminist cultural shifts, and better access to contraceptives, more women now approach childbearing the same way we approach other major life decisions: as a choice weighed against other desires, assessed in context. Without compulsory childbearing, this assessment continues throughout women’s childbearing years. The 24-year-old who says she wants children someday but is focusing on her career can easily turn into the 30-year-old who says she wants children but with the right partner. Later, she can easily become the 45-year-old who has a meaningful career, a community of people she feels connected to and a life rich in pleasure and novelty that she doesn’t want to surrender. Likewise, a mother sold in theory on three children might discover her family is complete with two, or one. Is that a woman who had fewer children than she intended? Or is she someone whose intentions were largely abstract in the first place, and they shifted as she did?”

In the end, societal pressures blended with financial realities have indeed reconfigured American demographics. Who we are as a nation will shift with political and economic winds, and whatever the United States looks like in the future, we all need to be aware that the notion of depending on American born for economic growth is one more Elvis that has left the building.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at some point in time we need to get sick and tired of Canada going after the tech savvy immigrants we need to fill so many open and otherwise unfillable jobs… so we can get them… the way we used to!