When Sarah and Ben Brewington got married they expected their next life step would be having kids. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. Instead, they kept delaying their first child, focusing on their careers, enjoying travel and spending time with friends.
The Brewingtons, both age 35, say they understand they are part of a wider trend. Far more people in the U.S. and around the world are choosing to have significantly fewer children or opting out of parenthood altogether.
“I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate,” Sarah Brewington told NPR. “There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there’s not going to be a workforce.”
Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They’re weighing their options and appear to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.
This change in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New research from the United Nations found that the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded. In every country and every culture, women are having fewer than half as many children as they did in the 1960s.
“Especially in high-income countries, the birth rate has very quickly plummeted in a sustained way,” Kearney said. “We’re actually really facing the question of depopulation.”
Many women are choosing fewer children – or no children at all
In the U.S., this shift is driven in part by a growing number of women deciding against motherhood. According to Kearney, half of American women now reach age 30 without having at least one child. That’s a dramatic increase from two decades ago, when only about a third of American women didn’t have a child by that age. Many families are also choosing to have significantly fewer children.
“I remember at one point I was like, ‘I definitely want three kids.’ I was like, ‘That’s gonna be great.’ That’s what my mom had. That’s what I want to have,” Lusely Martinez, age 35, told NPR.
One relatively simple way to track the scale of this shift in human behavior is what’s known as the “total fertility rate.” It’s a measure that predicts how many children a woman will have during her lifetime.
To maintain a stable population – no growth, no decline – the average woman needs to have roughly 2.1 kids. In the U.S., total fertility began dipping below that 2.1 threshold decades ago, and then after 2007, fertility rates plunged rapidly to a record low of roughly 1.6.
“I don’t have a number in mind where if we hit it, I’m going to start freaking out,” said Kearney, the economist at the University of Notre Dame. ‘But I already look around and see so many young people are finding themselves childless, and I worry we’re doing something wrong as a society.”
The population bomb that fizzled
The world’s rapid pivot toward declining birth rates and older, smaller populations can seem dizzying, especially after decades of warnings about the environmental harms and quality-of-life impacts of rising populations.
In the 1960s and 1970s, scientist Paul Ehrlich popularized the idea that the Earth was being threatened by what he described as a population bomb.
“No intelligent, patriotic American family should have more than two children, and preferably only one,” Ehrlich said in a 1970 interview with WOI-TV, warning that crowded U.S. cities faced a “fatal disease – it’s called overpopulation.”
“The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades,” said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.’s chief population scientist.
But as more women and couples delay parenthood, have fewer babies or don’t have children altogether, a growing number of nations around the world – more than 1 in 10 countries – have plunged to levels of childbearing so low that many scientists are worried.
“There’s just, relatively speaking, no children being born in South Korea,” said economist Phillip Levine at Wellesley College. According to U.N. data, by midcentury, 40% of South Korea’s population is expected to be age 65 or older.
In part because people are living so much longer, the global population is expected to keep rising for decades before these trends take hold, triggering a decline by the end of this century.
But many countries, including China, Italy, Japan, Russia and South Korea, have already seen populations begin to shrink. China alone is expected to lose more than 780 million people, more than half its population, by 2100.
How will the United States navigate far lower fertility?
So far, the U.S. population is relatively stable despite record-low fertility, but new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the nation’s fabric is already changing. Older people, those age 65 or above, now outnumber children in 11 states. That has risen sharply from just three states five years ago.
A 2023 study by the Brookings Institution, meanwhile, found that without significant numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the future, the country’s population would plunge by more than 100 million people this century.
“We would be losing about a third of our population between now and 2100 if there were no immigration to the United States,” said the study’s author, William Frey.
“What is our labor force going to be going forward? What is our productivity going forward?” Frey said. “We’ re going to have lots of jobs, and there’s going to be nobody there to take those jobs. I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure to increase immigration into the U.S.”
Lyman Stone, who leads the Pronatalism Initiative at the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies, says the U.S. needs to do more to help families prioritize children, in part by making parenting more affordable. He supports child tax credits and policies allowing parents to work from home.
Stone believes many young people would like to have more children but are struggling to achieve the milestones they believe are necessary to begin having children.
Emma Waters, with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, agrees it’s time for a national conversation about birth rates and the choices families are making. “We’re going to have more adults than we have children to replace them, and that will heavily impact things like our military readiness, GDP and economic growth in the U.S.”
Kantorová, Levine, Kearney and others said these “crisis” narratives about population decline are exaggerated and misleading. In most countries, demographic shifts are expected to play out over decades. Some nations, including France, have managed to stabilize declining fertility, albeit at relatively low levels.
Some progressives – as well as many population experts – also view conservative pronatalist policies, including opposition to reproductive rights and calls for a return to “traditional” family structures, as a threat to women.
“Some of these measures and policies can be deeply harmful, especially those related to sexual and reproductive health and choices and women’s empowerment – and that’s worrying,” said the U.N.’s Kantorová.
But many of those same experts agree that declining birth rates are a real and pressing issue that should be addressed by thinkers and policymakers across the political spectrum.
While scientists and politicians grapple with the declining number of children, many of the couples and women interviewed by NPR said this issue is deeply personal, private and often difficult.
Annie Platt, age 31, who lives in South Carolina, said she and her husband, Ryan Holley, 37, have struggled with a choice that would redefine the rest of their lives.
“We’ve always kind of been on the fence like, ‘’Oh, it’d be cool to have kids, and this is what their names would be,’” Platt said. “Then in more recent years, it’s been like more leaning towards no.”
Platt and other women said they see little role for the government in trying to encourage or incentivize their choices about parenthood.
“I think it’s gross,” Platt told NPR. “I feel very icked out, I guess, when I hear people like JD Vance, Elon Musk, talk about their family values and, like, incentivizing having a child.”
Platt added that she is suspicious of right-wing political leaders’ motives. “I think they just want to use women to have babies, and maybe that would also distract the mothers, or the mothers-to-be, from pursuing other things in life, maybe other career goals,” Platt said.
Sarah Brewington had similar feelings: “It feels unethical to tell people to go through a grueling process because you want to have another baby in the world.”
“Trusting individuals to make those decisions is kind of what it comes down to,” said Ben Brewington.
Lusely Martinez, who told NPR she and her husband decided to have only one child, said she doesn’t believe the U.S. will embrace the kinds of changes – from affordable housing and health care to day care and paid family leave – that families need in order to make their lives easier.
“My biggest concern is like what is the big focus on us having children when you’re not necessarily focused on how the rest of the life of a person is?” Martinez said.
Activists and scientists across the political spectrum, including those who view population decline as a grave concern, agree it will be difficult and costly to create a culture and environment where Americans return to having significantly more children.
“Absent a very dedicated response, I absolutely think it is not just possible but likely that fertility rates will keep falling,” said Kearney. “I’m a bit more worried about where we are than some other people, who are waiting to reach, let’s say, a point of no return.”
Source: npr.org by Brian Mann & Sarah McCammon