Why are fertility rates falling so fast in so much of the world at the same time? This is the huge question considered in an extremely important new paper by academics Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine. Perhaps the main cause is the cost of living, or perhaps it is changing social norms. The authors come down in favour of the second factor as the main cause.
Kearney and Levine’s broad conclusion is that the decline in births below replacement level across the industrialised world is mostly being brought about by “a widespread de-prioritisation of parenthood in people’s adult lives”.
The two authors do accept that making it more affordable for people to have children can make a difference, but ultimately it is social norms that must change if fertility rates are to move back towards the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman or above needed to stop continual population decline and aging. To put it another way, adults need to give more priority to being parents than to other goals.
Kearney and Levine do not argue that becoming a parent has become unimportant as such for most people. However, they argue that the wish to become a parent now competes with “changing norms around work, parenting [how expensive and time-consuming will it be?], gender roles, and leisure, [which are] shaped by evolving social and economic influences and an expanded set of non-child activities and consumption”.
They set out a model that looks at people’s evolving life priorities and how children fit in.
Kearney and Levine say that among more recent cohorts of adults, “there has been a rise in the availability and social acceptability of consumption-oriented lifestyles emphasising leisure and travel”.
They add: “There has also been a proliferation of digital media, high-quality gaming, online pornography, social networks, and self-development, among other non-child (and more generally, non-family) centred adult activities”. A lot of this is, of course, internet and smartphone-related.
“These new choice elements”, they say, can “generate social status, identity and belonging”.
Consider, for example, travel, and the extent to which many of us like to boast about the exotic places we’ve been to. Holidaying in exotic places confers status. It generates ‘likes’ on social media. It makes you part of a club, so to speak. You can talk about your exotic holiday experiences to other people who have done the same.
But all this costs time and money, and travelling is much harder with children, especially if it is to some far-flung place. Travel to distant locations is also something we generally prefer to do when we are young, that is, during our peak fertility years. (Lyman Stone explains in this piece how travel might be ‘wrecking the birth rate’).
The authors also consider that as “more people choose alternatives to parenthood and a child-focused life”, and smaller families and even childlessness become ever more normal, “this can lead to contagion or multiplier effects that establish and solidify new norms around work, parenting, gender roles and leisure”.
Parenthood ends up being “further deprioritised against other uses of time and resources”.
Putting all this together, it’s no wonder fertility rates have fallen so low, and appear set to drop even more.
So, should we give up hope? Well, for one thing we can’t. We literally can’t afford to. A rapidly ageing population will come with very serious social and economic costs that the young adults of today will ultimately have to pay because they are the ones who will end up living in a society with lots of old people and not enough young people.
On this point, Kearney and Levine hold out the hope that social norms can shift again. They say: “But it is possible that subsequent [age] cohorts will choose to re-prioritise parenthood, even with the availability of an expanded set of choices. This could happen if, for instance, the ageing of these lower-fertility cohorts is associated with increased social isolation and diminished life satisfaction. This could lead subsequent cohorts to alter their views in ways that could lead to further changes in norms, and a new equilibrium in which parenthood plays a more central role”.
Getting to the point where social norms shift in a more pro-child direction again will probably take a long time (decades?) and involve a lot of pain in the meantime. Out of that pain, the change may come and indeed must come. For reasons explained in this paper from The Iona Institute last year, some of the change will come from religious people because of their higher-than-average motivation to marry and have children meaning Western societies in the future may well be more religious than at present.
