Vietnam just abandoned its policy limiting families to two children. China now says, “Three is best.” The Russian government is targeting child-free lifestyles. And the White House is mulling baby bonuses.
Many countries are trying to reverse record low birthrates, but a new report from the United Nations Population Fund contends that governments are operating on a “fertility fallacy” — an assumption that young people no longer want children, or at least not as many as they once did. Policymakers, the report says, are failing to recognize the real crisis: money.
In surveying people in 14 countries on four continents, the agency found that financial security is a major issue for people considering whether to have children. Its report, published on Tuesday, says that many people have, or expect to have, fewer children than they wanted.
“It is often assumed or implied that fertility rates are the result of free choice,” the report said. “Unfortunately, that is not the whole picture.”
The report pushes back on a cultural and political narrative preoccupied with raising fertility, which blames younger generations, particularly women, for not having children because it would interfere with their desired lifestyles.
Instead of lamenting the rise of what Vice President JD Vance called “childless cat ladies,” or blaming individuals for dwindling populations, as many “pro-natalists” have, experts say that those who worry about stagnant or declining populations should scrutinize the conditions that make people doubt that they can raise children with a sense of security.
“The survey shows people want children but are saying the conditions aren’t right,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer who directs the University of North Carolina’s population center, and who was not involved in the U.N. study.
What is also remarkable about the report, experts said, is that it raises questions about whether the way to increase fertility is to target birthrates directly, rather than overall quality of life. And it points to other areas of policymaking that appear less directly related to population size but that could lead to the desired results.
The report’s conclusions stem from a survey of about 14,000 people in Brazil, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Thailand, Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden and the United States — countries that represent more than a third of the global population.
Researchers discovered common frustrations across the board. Dr. Guzzo noted in an interview that people in India and those in the United States often cited the same worries about providing for their children.
The U.N. report’s findings, she said, align with her own research on fertility in the United States, which found a mismatch among people’s goals, expectations and outcomes, often associated with economic concerns. People are not saying “no” to having children, she added, so much as they are saying “not now” when they are worried about economic security.
Among adults over age 50, whose reproductive lives were presumably complete, nearly a third reported having fewer children than they ideally would have chosen. Among those under 50, about one in nine said they expected they, too, would end up short of the desired number. Far fewer people, regardless of age, reported having, or expecting, to have, more children than they wanted.
While the notion that money, or the lack thereof, drives family size may seem obvious to anyone who has a child or has ever considered having one, demographers unrelated to the survey say that the report is important because it starts to quantify that understanding.
Demographers say that the baby bonuses and other short-term perks offered in some countries do not boost population size because they fail to consider persistent structural issues, like paid parental leave, child care and housing costs.
Thoai Ngo, who chairs Columbia University’s department of population and family health, noted that working women, in particular, faced more pressure than ever to spend time with their children and to provide them with extracurricular opportunities while trying to fulfill their own personal and professional aspirations.
The U.N. report is valuable, he said in an interview on Wednesday, because it shifts the cultural focus from an “alarmist perspective around population decline” to scrutinize policies that would help people to “start and grow a family with dignity and opportunity.”
But Dr. Ngo said that more research was needed to get a complete picture of how work and family are linked.
He noted that the report did not address the role of immigration as a solution. The survey also did not address the role of technology in changing labor dynamics. But the rise of artificial intelligence is expected to replace some human tasks and may change the relationship between family formation and work life, he said.
The world’s population is expected to peak later this century and then fall. But in many countries, including the United States, fertility has fallen well below the replacement rate, and populations in Europe and parts of East Asia have been falling for years.
Policymakers see in those trends a brewing economic crisis, with fewer working-age people supporting the economy, and more older people collecting pensions and needing expensive care.
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