A little over a year ago, I interviewed a demographer for a piece about the possible causes of fertility decline. (The piece, sadly, was never published.) At some point in our conversation, she stopped me in order to clarify something: The problem with falling fertility, she wanted me to know, is not that people are choosing to have too few kids, but that they are having fewer kids than they’d like.
As someone who has been following the Great Baby Bust for a few years now, this is a sentiment I am used to encountering. Talking publicly about something as personal as fertility can seem icky, and some people chafe against admitting that a low birth rate is a problem at all. But even among the growing ranks willing to acknowledge that it merits some attention, I find many can be cagey about the true nature of the problem.
Some are quick to insist that, to the extent that low fertility poses economic challenges, we ought to reform our economic system rather than attempting to get people to supply the kids needed to sustain it. “If you’re worried about the sustainability of the pension system, for example, then you fix the pension system,” Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer who once expressed similar sentiments to me, told Reason. Others, like the researcher I mention at the top of this piece, are only willing to acknowledge the baby bust as a problem to the extent that it reflects a mismatch between desires and outcomes, a view that feeds into an endless debate about whether falling fertility truly reflects people’s preferences or not. Even those who seem perfectly well aware that low fertility is a challenge for society often set about addressing it by treating it as a problem for individuals—that is, by attempting to reassure would-be parents that parenthood is a gift, one that brings immense emotional rewards that the child-free life simply cannot replicate, and that people forgo at the expense of their own happiness. In all cases, it amounts to an understandable but, in my view, ultimately counterproductive hesitation to admit that the real reason we’re having this discussion is not that individuals need kids, but that society does.
There is some wisdom to the former approach. People understandably don’t want to go anywhere near the suggestion that we should goad—or worse, coerce—people into having kids they don’t want. I also suspect that, on a gut level, people know that if you are trying to encourage someone to have kids, yammering on about slowing GDP growth won’t get you very far. And yet, I think the temptation to either deny or politely ignore the real economic challenges low fertility presents in our attempt to reverse it is not only disingenuous, but doomed to fail. I don’t think it’s possible to convince more people to raise kids without admitting that, ultimately, society will suffer if they don’t.
“In a very literal sense, society needs my kids more than I do.”
This is a difficult position to trace out because, in a sense, I agree that people having fewer kids than they’d like is indeed a problem. Is it the problem, though? By that logic, if desired fertility fell to zero tomorrow, and people ceased having kids altogether, then all would be well, which is silly. I am certainly not an alarmist on this issue. As I’ve reported before, there is some disagreement among researchers about how far fertility can fall and for how long before it causes issues. Some hold that, with rising levels of education and technological advancement, the birth rate could fall below replacement for quite a while before standards of living fall. But I’ve yet to encounter any demographer or economist seriously arguing that fertility could totally bottom out without consequence. Even the Norwegian population economist Vegard Skirbekk, the author of a book called Decline and Prosper!: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children admits that, below certain levels of fertility, problems will arise. It is simply a fact that for a society to function, a substantial share of its members need to raise children.
Today, it’s considered sort of distasteful to talk about the practical, economic benefits of raising children—the fact that today’s kids will become the workers and taxpayers who keep the show running when we are all too feeble to do so. But raising productive laborers who will contribute to their communities and care for the elderly has always been a major purpose of bearing children. It’s just that parents of the past captured more of the fruits of their labor. They raised kids who worked for them, on their farms and in their trades, and then cared for them in old age. These days, most of us are raising kids who will spend the majority of their lives working for someone else. In other words, modern economies have created a pretty fundamental disconnect between who raises children and who benefits from their labor as adults. In a very literal sense, society needs my kids more than I do.
I don’t want to overstate the matter. There are still practical reasons to have kids: Even in countries that robustly subsidize aged care, the elderly are heavily reliant on informal care from kin, especially adult children. While it’s true that procreation isn’t as reliable a retirement plan as it once was, older people without kids or partners experience the biggest shortfalls in elder care. And of course, parenting is indeed very rewarding, as I can personally attest. But I suspect that focusing on only what kids do for parents without acknowledging what parents do for society will ultimately undermine the effort to encourage people to have kids.
For one thing, selling people on the emotional rewards of parenting is a trickier task than it sounds. It requires maintaining a sunny view of parenting, which can easily backfire when people discover that it is in fact a pretty tough job. I suspect much of the most negative content about parenthood circulating online is a direct byproduct of the disillusionment that often occurs for those who pursue parenthood solely on the promise of individual fulfillment. And anyone who speaks openly about the challenges of parenthood (as, cards on the table, I often do) is viewed as undermining the pronatalist effort. You can, somewhat ironically, end up placing the blame for low birth rates on the very people who are actually having kids.
Perhaps more importantly, though, this approach ignores the fact that the societal value of parenthood is an integral part of what makes it rewarding. To pretend that it ultimately doesn’t matter how many kids people have as long as they have the number they want is to rob parents of a source of satisfaction common to many other types of work: the knowledge that they are contributing meaningfully to society. It is as absurd as attempting to recruit people to the army while pretending that it doesn’t matter if anyone signs up. If anyone really believed that the world would carry on just fine without doctors, or nurses, or firemen, fewer people would take up those roles, not because there is no personal satisfaction to be gleaned from them, but because that satisfaction is often linked to the purpose they serve in society. There is evidence that “prosocial” motivation plays a significant role in drawing people into the nursing profession, government or the military. This sort of other-centered impulse is, no doubt, only part of the puzzle—I don’t think many people would become nurses for free just for the satisfaction of serving their communities—but it’s an important part nonetheless. People are drawn to work through a mixture of values and practical considerations; their motivations for having kids are likely going to be the same.
I think this sort of validation is particularly important for work that asks more of people than money can ever really repay. How do you adequately compensate a soldier for risking his life? I don’t think you can. We account for this irredeemable sacrifice by honoring it — certainly not by pretending that the soldier risks his life for his own good. All around me, I can see that parents, and mothers in particular, are desperate for some recognition that the work they are undertaking is valuable, not just for themselves or their children, but for the world. Will people be motivated to have kids for the sake of GDP? Maybe not, if you put it that way. But does the prospect of serving one’s community and society motivate people to take on emotionally and physically taxing, even life-risking, work? Yes, all the time. Some argue that a version of this decidedly not individualistic motivation is one reason Israel’s fertility rate is so unusually high.
Those of us who want to reverse falling fertility while preserving the values of a liberal society have a tricky task ahead. We’ve got to hold two truths at once: that no one ought to be coerced into parenthood, and that we will all suffer if no one raises kids. That may seem like an impossible line to walk—and yet, we walk versions of it all the time. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that would hesitate to admit that we need doctors. And yet, most of us agree no one should be coerced into medical school. In other words, acknowledging the necessity of parents while respecting individuals’ right not to become one is really just a matter of applying the same logic to parenting that we do to every other path in life.
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