Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
801

So all but one of the current main originating countries with higher birthrates than the US. As noted, several with their own birthrates recently dropping modestly below replacement level. But you are located on the other side of the pond? And there the main immigration groups are those welcomed from Ukrainians and Belarus, and the not welcomed Syrian refugees and those from Africa.

I am interested though in thinking ahead, and I am clearly repeating myself by now: there will be climate refugees. Declining birthrates won’t be the existential threat to a country when your major coastal cities are flooding and/or you cannot produce or purchase enough food.

I get your fear of your national character being swamped by fundamentalist believers of a faith you do not share.

And you get that there are no practical interventions to bring declining birthrates back to let alone over replacement levels.

Hopefully you appreciate that the rightist fantasy of a return to women knowing their place was pregnant if not barefoot, is not going to happen even with regressive policies. Encouraging those as social values would likely ironically lower birthrates catastrophically.

So there really are not too many choices. We work around the edges with interventions that have modest impact, like subsidized childcare, and maybe some corporate support for flexible schedules including work from home explicitly as support for parenting by both mothers and fathers.

And the shortfall has to made up by welcoming immigrants in a controlled manner and appreciating the positives of a pluralistic society.

And also hoping that technology helps out with increasing productivity too.

There simply is no other choice than hurtling to a graying society abyss.

802

How many other things in life are expected to be done from completely unselfish motives? If that’s the standard for parenthood, it’s not surprising the birth rate is so low.

Realistically, given the time, effort and expense involved, I don’t think anyone is having kids solely for this reason. And it’s fine for it to be part of the motivation; to have children, people need to believe that the kids will - overall and in the long run - improve their lives, not make them worse. Part of that benefit is having someone younger to care about, and to care about you in old age, and the possibility of grandchildren. A personal link with the future.

If you want to raise the birth rate, not immediately slapping down people starting to mull over having kids would definitely help. I feel like this kind of thinking is often a manifestation of people moving on to a later life stage, the biological clock ticking, looking at different possible futures and deciding which one you want to be yours. It should be the start of a conversation, not something that’s reflexively dismissed as a negative sign.

803

Then we don’t disagree, since as I clearly said, the problematic part is if that were the sole or primary motive for having kids.

And as far as I can tell from what you quoted from that commenter, they don’t necessarily disagree with that perspective either. If somebody is treating the advantage they expect to get from their kids in their own old age as the chief motivation for having kids, then it’s not anti-natalist to critique that.

But you and I are in agreement that most parents don’t consider that their chief motivation for having kids. Is there any evidence that anybody is in fact accusing parents as a group of having that as their chief motivation for having kids? Or are we just attacking a straw anti-natalist here?

804

On the contrary, that does look like where the future is headed, with women being stripped of all rights and reduced to sex slaves/breeding machines. The Handmaid’s Tale, except with a lot of racism mixed in on top.

And history does show it can be done. It just results in a hellish, impoverished society and large numbers of unwanted and neglected children. But those are things the Right would consider positives.

805

It takes 20 years before the effects of below-replacement births even begin to be felt (absent immigration). It’s an interesting question how middle and low income countries - often not used to being immigration destinations - will react to the situation. I could see China clamping down on emigration in future. The others seem less likely to do so, but they will have a similar problem of needing to keep society functioning, and far less ability to pay for childcare etc. They also mostly have a more patriarchal society, which may cause further drops if you are correct about the reasons South Korea is so much worse off than Sweden.

No, not at all. Historically, most immigrants were from Commonwealth countries and Ireland, then after 2004 from Eastern Europe (Poland and Romania the largest sources), and post Brexit (2020) back to the Commonwealth again, with giants India and Nigeria the leading countries. Plus humanitarian immigration from Ukraine and Hong Kong, and a smaller number of asylum seekers from elsewhere. Most migrants to the UK have always come legally to work, or as dependants of those working, and illegal immigration is a much smaller part of the total compared to the US.

Whereas for you, the religious are already there; perhaps you think more immigration will help to prevent your country being taken over politically by fundamentalist believers of a faith you do not share?

Judging by current results, it very well may be having the opposite effect.

No, I don’t accept that. What has been tried so far is mostly direct subsidies of childcare, and small (compared to the overall cost) cash payments. Meanwhile structural factors have continued to advance in the wrong direction, with increasing numbers of young people spending longer in education and rising house prices both delaying milestones commonly considered necessary for having kids. Add in long-hours work culture and high pressure educational competitiveness in East Asian countries. Plus the message coming from governments and schools, as well as society in general, has been that people are a burden on the planet and reproducing is something parents do for themselves rather than a pro-social benefit to society.

I’d like to see an effort made to reverse these trends and this messaging before giving up on the idea that raising birth rates is possible.

I hate to agree with @Der_Trihs, but I fear at least some countries are going to try this. It already happened in Iran and Afghanistan. Even if it doesn’t work for this purpose, a subset of men would support it for their own benefit.

806

I’m a bit puzzled about your claim that the first of those factors is advancing “in the wrong direction”, namely time spent in education.

In the US, the average age of first-time motherhood is 26. Do we actually want that number to be significantly lower, especially in light of findings that the adult brain doesn’t finish cognitively maturing until age 25 or so? It seems to me just the other day that pundits were wringing their hands over the scourge of teen parenthood. Now we want to encourage more teens to have babies?

Because if that’s not the goal, then I don’t see what’s wrong with having the expectation that on average, childbearing won’t start until the early to mid-20s, by which time formal education for the vast majority of people will have been finished.

Now, the structural costs of various factors, including not only rising housing costs but increasing college debt levels, are indeed a problem holding many young people back from parenthood. Those are indeed issues that something needs to be done about (and Biden tried, to some extent, with the student debt forgiveness program).

But I’m not seeing how post-secondary education in itself should be discouraged as an impediment to parenthood for teenagers. I think on the whole we want impediments to parenthood for teenagers. Demanding that very young people need to hurry up with committing themselves to decades of child-rearing when they’ve barely finished being children themselves seems uncomfortably exploitative.

807

No, we don’t. But there’s a whole lot of space between teens and 26. And while the average age is 26 according to this, the age of first time mothers varies quite a bit by education and geography. These are 2016 numbers but

In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21,

We don’t want teens to have more babies - but it might be better if some of those who are waiting until their mid to late thirties tried sooner rather than later. Because if you have the first at 35 or 40, there’s a decent chance there won’t be a second.

808

True, if they actually want to have more babies than their late start in childbearing makes possible or likely.

But in that case, I don’t really see the relevance of worrying about whether they finish their schooling at age 18 (or for that matter, 16) versus 22 (i.e., “spending longer in education”). Both of those ages allow plenty of time for someone to begin a decade or more of childbearing years after completing their formal education.

If the problem is that educational costs structurally make it harder to start affording parenthood, that’s a separate issue from “time spent in education” per se. That needs to be addressed on its own merits.

And given that wealthy women are on average very likely to be college-educated, and also more likely than middle-class women to have multiple children and to start having them younger, that suggests that the problem is indeed one of structural cost, rather than merely chronological delay.

Make it possible for more people to afford having kids, irrespective of their education level or socioeconomic status, and you won’t have so many middle-class people delaying parenthood to the absolute last possible moment in order to be able to handle the financial impacts.

809

I’m reminded of an article I read years ago, pointing out that this is a point where our society and culture conflict with human biology. Biologically, women should have children while young; not as teens, but young enough to be at their physical peak and maximum fertile lifespan remaining. But doing it that way would torpedo any career aspirations they have, especially since starting later is looked at askance by employers. So women put off having children which means they have less fertile time remaining, it’s physically harder on them, and the chance of something going wrong higher.

810

There’s this narrative that it’s bad and irresponsible to have kids unless you can meet a long list of preconditions. Some of those are material, like being married or in a LTR, being financially stable, getting established in your career to the point you can take a few years off, preferably owning your own home. And some of them are social: the idea that you should only have kids if you are prepared to be totally selfless, put them first at all times, look after them for their whole lives if necessary, if they happen to be born with a disability, and not expect anything in return - like support in old age.

IMO this causes a lot of people to delay or avoid becoming parents, and the messages heard by someone who isn’t sure about whether to go ahead and have kids or not are particularly important. What you want your old age to be like should be a factor in the decision, and comments like the one I posted will make people discount this, and even think they shouldn’t be parents because they cared about something like that.

Yes. Average age of first birth for college educated mothers in the US is 30-31. By which point fertility problems are more likely, there’s less time to investigate and resolve them, and there isn’t really time to have more than 2 babies before hitting 35, when childbearing gets more risky and the chance of birth defects increases.

It’s not that higher education in itself goes on until this age (unless you’re training to be a doctor, maybe). But most people want to be settled in their careers, and to have accumulated some savings before having kids, and spending more years in education pushes this point back. Doing a graduate degree makes it even worse. And this applies to both partners, because a couple will want to be financially secure before taking on the expense and shifted priorities of raising kids.

Maybe what we need is a model where women have kids in their late teens or early 20s, then the kids are mostly raised by their grandparents while the young women continue with education and career. Then when the kids reach adulthood, the parents will be settled and ready to raise their grandchildren. :thinking:

Or just develop better reproductive tech so women can have kids at a time that better fits current lifestyles. But you still have the problem of lack of energy, and of aging parents who won’t be around for as long, can’t help out with grandchildren etc.

811

Yup. That’s where the necessity for structural supports comes in.

If society is allowing women to pursue careers that give them personal autonomy and economic independence, then it can’t require women to make a permanent choice between career and motherhood, or require women to make their individual careers support their motherhood.

In the first case, you’ll just get a lot of women eschewing motherhood altogether, because “yeah I’d like a baby but I can’t risk the economic precarity of having no career, and/or I’d like a baby but not enough to give up my entire chance of professional status and fulfillment for it.”

In the second case, you’ll just get a lot of women playing “fertility chicken”, testing the biological limits of delaying motherhood in order to minimize its financial and personal impacts as much as possible: “if I get that promotion three years down the road then I’ll be making enough to afford childcare when I finally take maternity leave to have that baby I want.”

Which, as you note, is exactly the situation we’ve currently got. But if we weren’t requiring parents to do so much of the heavy lifting of parenthood solely on the resources of their own earning careers, there would be much less incentive to play “fertility chicken”.

812

I agree that these expectations are practical limitations that our current societal structure is essentially imposing on parents, and that they do have a lot of real-life impacts in pushing people to delay or forego parenthood.

These ones are taking us more into “straw antinatalist” territory, ISTM. I concur that there are doubtless some people who idealistically demand such a level of total selflessness from parents, but are their opinions really a significant factor in motivating people to delay or forego parenthood? So far, ISTM that the consensus is more that people shouldn’t be primarily or solely motivated by selfish reasons in seeking parenthood.

I think that the other category, the structural-support issues, is most likely a far more salient influence on the real-world parenthood decisions that people end up making.

813

Given the large gap in fertility between religious and non-religious women, and the seemingly-small effect of measures like free childcare and free college, I think it’s far more likely that social attitudes make the biggest difference. If you are part of a (sub)culture that expects everyone to have kids, and maybe sees those who don’t as objects of pity, then you will most likely have kids. If you are part of a subculture that holds parents to very high standards, looks down on you as irresponsible if you don’t meet them, and expects you to make a considered decision, there’s a much higher chance you won’t.

814

You understand that it is exactly these requirements that lead many women to delay attempting their first pregnancy until they are 35, when it’s much harder to get pregnant, right?

At least, i personally know an enormous number of women in that category, and a lot of them had trouble conceiving, and some failed altogether.

815

I started at 29, mostly because i had a grandmother and an aunt who struggled with fertility. Turned out that i took after my mother, and promptly popped out two kids. (We were better at birth control than my parents, and neither had kids before we were ready, nor continued having kids after deciding we were done.)

816

Wow, that analogy is pretty strained. Traditionally religious communities do impose on their members strong doctrinal beliefs on the necessity and desirability of parenthood, generally accompanied by corresponding social structures such as limited educational or career opportunities for women, subordination of women to men, etc. And those influences/coercions definitely do result in higher birthrates.

But that in no way proves that birthrates in an egalitarian secular community would be comparably influenced by a far more minor change in social attitudes.

You are trying to compare two very different things:

  1. the influence on parenthood decisions in mainstream society exerted by the social attitudes of your vaguely identified (and still rather strawish) parent-shaming idealists, and

  2. the influence on parenthood decisions in male-dominated traditionally religious cultures exerted by the entire dominant worldview of those cultures.

That’s silly. Just because, for instance, Christian Patriarchy (or Quiverfull) women are indoctrinated into a culture of female subservience and divinely ordained procreation, and have lots of babies in consequence, doesn’t mean that the average women in mainstream society is similarly going to significantly increase her fecundity just because people go out of their way to tell her “hey, there’s nothing wrong with having your parenthood choices slightly influenced by selfish motives.”

Nah. As I noted above, the women with the most wealth are the ones having the most kids. It’s not that rich women are somehow immune from the same “social attitudes”—being “part of a subculture that holds parents to very high standards”, as you put it—that affect all the rest of us. It’s simply that they have the resources to choose parenthood without having the practical and financial demands of parenthood destroy their professional careers or personal health and comfort. In other words, it’s mostly about the structural-support issues.

817

Regardless of when the human brain fully matures, the peak fertile years for human women are the late teens through the mid-20’s. Starting at 25 means you’re starting at the tail end of peak fertility, and at age 30 the chances of a woman conceiving naturally start to fall off fairly quickly.

Obviously, we don’t want 12 year olds producing babies but young women in the 18-25 year old range are actually, from a physical standpoint, at the ideal point to have babies.

If we could structure a society where pregnancy, birth, and childcare could be supported while young women are pursuing their educations or moving in the work world we could have best of both worlds… but we don’t live in that timeline.

818

So what happens when people who’ve been encouraged to have children before they’re brains have fully matured mature and decide parenthood isn’t for them? How does society deal with that? It’ll be rare, but it will happen. Not only that, but it’ll happen at a higher rate with one sex than the other.

819

The same sort of thing that happens when they make all sorts of other decisions that they regret later. You’re never going to convince people to tolerate being treated as children until they are “age 25 or so”.

820

True, but in between 25 and 30, AFAICT, female fertility remains high and steady, and doesn’t decrease very much in early 30s.

ISTM that the trouble with getting more social support for early childbearing is that our society traditionally and persistently ties childbearing structurally to marriage. And very young adults are often not in the best place for forming stable marital relationships, at least in cultures where adults expect considerable amounts of autonomy, and tolerance for social nonconformity, in their adult lifetimes.

There seem to be some communities, e.g. among Black American single mothers, where some people are supporting a more intentional separation of parenthood and marriage. (And they also have higher birthrates than the US average.)

I think that if we in developed nations really want to increase our birthrates, especially among younger people, we’ve got to (a) put more resources into structural supports for making parenthood a doable project financially, and (b) explore other kinds of societal support that don’t automatically assume parental marriage as a prerequisite. Clearly, traditionalist diatribes along the lines of “we need to return to values that prioritize marriage and family” and “we’ll give married couples a (small) cash bonus for having babies”, etc., are not working.