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By Jordan King
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Wealthy countries all over the world are struggling with historically low birth rates—a new study has looked at why this is the case and has a slightly different answer to what research has said before.
It argues that "short-term changes in income or prices cannot explain the widespread decline" in fertility, but rather there has been a "broad reordering of adult priorities with parenthood occupying a diminished role."
Authors of the paper are essentially addressing a widely accepted narrative – that young people are not having children because of their economic situations.
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"We first started exploring the more conventional reasons for why birth rates are low/falling, which are largely based on economic factors, and learned that they don't do a very good job at explaining what we see," author Phillip B. Levine, an economist from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told Newsweek.
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"It led us to think more broadly about possible explanations and that led us to the concept of 'shifting priorities'."
The 2008 financial crisis and its impact on housing, inflation and pay is generally cited a major contributor to people's decisions to delay having children, to have fewer children or not to have them at all.
Parental leave and childcare come up just as often, with multiple experts telling Newsweek that improved policies in these areas would be a game-changer.
But authors Melissa Schettini Kearney, an economist from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and Levine argue that decline in fertility is "less a reflection of specific economic costs or policies, but rather, "a widespread re-prioritization of the role of parenthood in people's adult lives."
However, they do not throw out the economic context completely, saying that it provides a "clean and compelling argument" with many relevant insights.
The study, titled The Fertility Transition in the United States: New Evidence from Cohort Data, was conducted by academics affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). It is a working paper (pre-publication) released in May 2024, with the most recent version updated this month.
What Is The Birth Rate Crisis?
Fertility rates (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) have dropped below replacement rates of 2.1 births per woman (required to maintain a stable population without immigration) in most high-income countries.
For example, America's fertility rate is now projected to average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest forecast released this year.
Countries including Japan, Italy, Canada, Greece and Italy have seen their fertility rates drop to below 1.5 while others, such as South Korea, Singapore and China, are recording levels under 1, according to the NBER study.
This could mean an aging population for many of these nations, leaving a higher number of the elderly than there are working-age people to support them.
Many governments have made this a priority, including the U.S.'s Donald Trump administration, which has explored giving women a "baby bonus" of $5,000, according to an April New York Times report.
Politicians have also looked at making childbirth free for privately insured families and giving states more or less transport funding depending on how high or low their birth and marriage rates are.
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Why Are Rich Countries Struggling With Birth Rates?
Kearney and Levine repeatedly cite a phenomenon that they call "shifting priorities" to refer to "changes in how much value people place on different life choices, generally reflecting a greater emphasis on personal fulfillment and career."
Work-Life Balance
This "shift" includes the fact that most women in high-income countries now work, while it was previously "reasonable to consider having children as a widespread priority for women."
But they do not attribute this to "whether women work at all after they are married or have had their first child" but rather "the tension between a lifetime career and the way motherhood interrupts or alters that lifetime career progression."
Kearney and Levine write that while policies that try and address this, such as paid leave and childcare options, "have at best only a small effect on fertility outcomes."
"This may not be that surprising, since the commitment to raising a child extends far beyond a few months or even a year after giving birth (as addressed by paid leave)," they said.
Changes in Preferences and Priorities
Kearney and Levine disclaim that these social and cultural factors are "hard to quantify," but go on to cite multiple studies that show more and more people listing work and a desire to have "more leisure time."
Several surveys they reviewed showed that more people say having a career they enjoy and close friends is extremely or very important than those who say the same about having children.
"Social and cultural forces certainly can shape prevailing preferences and priorities," Kearney and Levine wrote.
They said these "forces" are often influenced by someone's peer group, and what it generally thinks about parenthood, and the media's portrayal of marriage and children in recent decades.
Kearney and Levine include a decline in religion in this section, as "cross-sectional data routinely show that people who identify as religiously observant have more children and that places that are more religious have higher fertility rates."
Indeed, Newsweek has reported on the decline in the number of religious people in America here, with more and more people identifying as atheists, agnostics or nothing at all.
Changes In Parenting
"Parenting has become much more resource- and time-intensive, both in the United States, as well as in many other high-income countries," Kearney and Levine wrote.
This was one of several similar conclusions that Norway's Birth Rate Committee came up with in its report last month, with its chair, Rannveig Kaldager Hart, referring to this as a rise in "intensive parenting," where parents invest time, money, and energy into creating successful adults.
The expectations of this parenting style "may cause some to postpone or have fewer children than they otherwise would," Hart told Newsweek.
Other Reasons
Additional reasons the study goes on to cite include a reduction in marriages, access to effective contraception, abortion policies, fertility and infertility treatments.
"If a society decides that increasing the birth rate is a priority, how should it proceed? The short answer is that there are no easy fixes. There is no single policy lever that will reliably boost fertility," Kearney and Levine said.
They went on to urge policies to target women before they are of reproductive age. "To be effective at boosting completed fertility, policies must influence the decisions women make early in their reproductive lives," they said. "Interventions targeting women well into their childbearing years are less likely to have large effects, as many life choices will have already been made."
But their main call to action is to "widen our lens" when discussing fertility. "There is still so much more we need to know before we can provide something resembling a definitive answer," they said.
"Policies like parental leave, childcare subsidies, baby bonuses, etc. are much easier to implement and have the potential to affect fertility more rapidly, if they were effective," Levine told Newsweek. "Changing the social conditions that encourage family formation is more difficult and takes longer to accomplish."
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