Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In 1920 more people still lived on farms, and those farms were less mechanized than today, especially outside of industrial countries. Under those circumstances more kids are more assets. To some extent, that still true even today.

In 2025 many more people live in urban areas, even in so-called “third world” or “undeveloped” countries where kids are liabilities from an economic standpoint.

It’s not just about financial security - even subsistence farmers want a certain level of security, that’s one of the reasons they have children along with preserving food and growing some cash crops - it’s also about a change in the economic milieu for billions of people.

In the past, cities relied in part on people moving from farms to urban areas to replenish their population. This was true quite far back into history. But now, there are fewer and fewer people in rural areas to supply that renewal. Cities now have to become self-replenishing of people, which is also a new thing historically.

That is a very pithy way to put it. Bravo! And suggests why lessons from the past may be inapplicable to the future.

The other day, the NYT published an opinion piece with a different take:

(Also a gift link)

The author starts by listing common reasons suggested from not having kids. Economics, finding the right partner, getting established in careers, concerns about climate change and the burden on the planet, convenient about bringing children into a broken world. Just because women now can choose not to. And then they say:

I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

Basically, it’s gotten really really hard to be agood parent, so why even try.

The author was in therapy for years, with a life threatening eating disorder, among other issues. Her therapist affirmed her pain, and said her parents sounded controlling. Modern therapy often assumes that our current pain is due to some kind of early trauma, and it’s our parents’ fault.

Like most suffering people, I was self-absorbed. Wrapped up in my own pain and dramas, I didn’t notice much about my mother.

Now that she’s pregnant, she’s suddenly thinking about that time from her mother’s perspective, and how much her mother gave up to sit miserably at her side and try to keep her alive and support her.

So why sign up to damage kids and be forever at fault for it?

She also points out that once upon a time, the commitment ran both ways. Parents were supposed to love and feed and train their kids, and in return, kids were supposed to love and honor and defer to their parents. But now, adult kids can just abandon their parents.

More emotional cost, less emotional benefit. → fewer kids.

Great cite. Thank you!

It’s a tired aphorism that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

The therapy argument makes sense. As does the economic security argument.

But they both come back to something along the lines of “Many of us have raised our goals from ‘living a life’ to ‘living my best life’.” Along the way, things that risk that bestness seem much more inhibiting than they used to be.

[aside]
A rough parallel might be the situation with marriage. So many of our generation and the next generation are products of divorce. Experiencing parental divorce as a kid is a pretty good predictor of reluctance to marry unless the fit seems perfect. With a knowing subtext of “Even perfect now is no guarantee of perfect 10 years from now”.

No wonder folks are feeling inhibited.

The One Big Beautiful Bill has a provision to set up a tax deferred savings account of $1,000 for every American newborn. To which parents can subsequently contribute $5,000 annually until the child is 18. Funds can then be withdrawn at a special low rate if used for education, purchase of a home or starting a new business.

To my untrained eye, this doesn’t appear to be of any help to those parents struggling financially.

In contrast to the free range days of most of us boomers, daily parental engagement is through the roof. My grandchildren do not seem to want to be out of their parents’ vision for even a moment, and vice versa. It looks exhausting.

A close friend with teenaged daughters also reports heavy engagement, even while his eldest has begun college. Despite (because?) enjoying sports extensively and apparently healthily, he says their daily anxiety levels are unbelievably high.

I don’t really know what point I’m circling around here except that current parenting is really difficult. How have today’s parents evolved into this behavior over the course of two generations?

I guess I have a bit of a different perspective.

My parents did everything they could to give me the best life I could have. (In many ways, they still do, like when they help out with my kids).

They’ve never asked me for anything in return, but they raised me to believe that the way I repay them is by paying it forward and doing the same thing for my kids.

So when I look at things like what the therapy generation article describes, my reaction isn’t, “the ways my parents screwed up hurt me, I’m resentful against them and don’t want kids of my own” - it’s “my parents did the best they could, and we now know things about childhood development and psychology that should help me do the best I can”.

The divorce rate in the U.S. has declined since 1980, when it reached the highest it has been since at least 1900.

Yep. And the kids who’re products of that era are todays grandparents and parents. The ones whose child reari g and child-creating behaviors were most shaped by that.

The people who are presently having children (or deciding not to have children) were born between about 1985 and 2005. So they were born after the divorce rate was falling. Their childhood was not during a time of rising divorce rates but of falling divorce rates. They are not influenced by rising divorce rates. They are influenced by other people telling them that the divorce rate is rising, but they can’t be bothered to actually look up the statisitics.

Just as grown children are no longer seen as owing their parents care in old age or even a continuing relationship, there is also no longer any obligation to ‘pay it forward’ by having kids of their own. Nor is there much pressure to stay with one’s spouse if they are failing to shape up in some way. There seems to be a general cultural movement towards the idea that no one owes anyone anything.

Probably partly that as child mortality has fallen, each child becomes more valuable and parents are more protective, plus competition to invest in one’s children and give them the best start in life.

@LSLGuy’s original point was that experiencing divorce as a child made people reluctant to marry (that was true for me). A major reason the divorce rate has been falling is that fewer people are marrying in the first place, and they are marrying later. Ie falling divorce rates are the result of greater caution in marrying, so they shouldn’t necessarily inspire people to be less cautious.

Do you have any statistics that these trends are true, or are you just guessing?

But then people do owe other people something.

So the divorce rate is falling, and people should know that rather than listen to other people claiming that it isn’t.

When you do you see it is tricky, and complicated by the fact that during that time fewer were getting married in the first place. So look at figure 3. Across groups the peak of divorce among those women ever married was in the 2000s. So young adults entering childbearing years now were being raised in an era of fewer long term marriages, a higher fraction of marriages failing, even as absolute divorce rates dropped modestly.

I’m not convinced of that being scared of not being a good enough parent is a factor though.

My point was that if you’re 23 now, and your parents are still married, but they were the products of divorce, as were their parents, then guess what: they’ve been harping at you since toddlerhood that marriage is dangerous and difficult. Because that message was seared into them as kids & young adults.

Each of us is raised by parents re-fighting their parents’ wars and in turn we raise our kids to re-fight our parents’ wars. Not entirely, but at least partially.

See figure one here for those numbers.

Marriage: More than a Century of Change, 1900-2022.

No, I don’t. Just noticing attitudes expressed in the media, advice columns etc, as well as social media. It would be interesting to see if there were any statistics on these attitudes over time.

I haven’t heard anyone claim the divorce rate is rising in years. Just that it’s high, which it is: 42% of UK marriages end in divorce according to Google.

Kids also often raise their own children in reaction to how they were raised, eg being lenient because they think their own parents were too strict, or vice versa.

Not sure if this was mentioned upthread - I can’t sift through 1,300 posts - but nowadays every generation after 1990 has been exposed to a consistent diet of social-media negativity about kids. Diapers + poop, screaming toddlers, tantrums on airplanes, mayhem in school, memes about how each child will cost you $785,000 directly or indirectly - not to mention tales of legal liability for parents even who weren’t really at fault (such as how a couple was charged with manslaughter for letting their 7-year old and 10-year old walk two blocks to a store and one kid was hit by a car.) Many Millennials and Gen-Z, etc. ask, “Why exactly should we have kids, and what is the benefit?”

The pro-natalist or pro-childbirth side is badly losing the meme war.

Are there any statistics showing this? You believe that someone who is not divorced themself will claim that marriage is dangerous and difficult? Do parents actually say this?

So shouldn’t we do something about the social-media diet, not about what happens in marriage?

Yes, exactly - social media has to change if there is to be any major change in birth rates. If people keep getting hit with the message that babies are a burden rather than a blessing or benefit, they aren’t going to have kids.

And it has to come organically. The change in social media can’t come from top-down from the government; that almost never wins or changes anyone’s heart. When the younger generations (age 20-35) see their peers or same-age influencers promoting family-raising, having kids, etc. then that’s what works.