Forty-four percent of childless women and men ages 18 to 49 expect to stay that way, saying that they are “not at all” or “not too likely” to have children someday, representing a 7 percent increase from 2018. When asked why they thought they would remain without child, 56 percent of the survey respondents said that it was because they just didn’t want them. Others cited a mix of influencing factors, the top two being medical (19 percent) and financial reasons (17 percent).
It’s a significant jump in less than five years. And while it’s no doubt pandemic-influenced, it’s also of a piece with the general downward trend in U.S. fertility, which in 2020 declined for the sixth straight year, reaching a record low. As of last year, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have over her lifetime) is at 1.64 children per woman, well below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1.
Our worries about the country’s waning fertility are often explained in economic terms: Fewer babies means less economic growth in the future — a crunch in funding government programs and Social Security payments going out faster than they come in. A shrinking population leads to less market dynamism and fewer taxpayers.
And the focus of our problem-solving tends to be economic, too. Financial stressors stopping families before they start? Just remove them! We could, as a country, get it together and finally fund paid family leave. And we could find a way to extend universal child care, or at least limit its costs. In fact, there’s legislation to do just that circulating the Capitol right now in the form of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan. It seems like a common sense fix — easy in theory, if not in government practice (thanks again, Sen. Joe Manchin III and the GOP).
As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, wrote in an essay for Plough magazine titled “The Case for One More Child”: “The more you deliberately organize institutions around supporting families, the more children would seem like a complement to education and opportunity rather than a threat.”
But I’m not sure that that would be enough.
The United States is, embarrassingly, the only wealthy nation with no paid maternity leave, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks it at the bottom of its peer countries in terms of the amount it invests in child care. But many wealthy nations do much more than the United States to support families, and their fertility rates still remain well below the replacement rate.
That’s perhaps because of the most-cited reason for not having children — the one we tend to sigh over, shrug and ignore because the fix isn’t as clear: “We just don’t want to.”
This may sound freeing, and maybe it is. The stigma around not having children is lessening, and perhaps many people who would have begrudgingly reproduced will now simply … not. Women in particular have more opportunities to live their own lives rather than living through their offspring, and they’re taking them.
But, on the other hand, this trend suggests a narrowing lens and a darkening view. The emphasis on our own lives and pleasures as most important suggests something of a lack of interest in the human enterprise as a whole — not just taking part in it, but contributing to it.
A large segment of Americans is not particularly interested in the future. They think that their lives are decent enough as they are, but not good enough to pass on — or, alternatively, not worth interrupting for something as demanding and not immediately rewarding as a baby. Unlike paid-leave policies or child-care costs, this is not something that policy can quickly fix.
And while this mind-set of course contributes negatively to our falling fertility rates, the disaffectedness has broader ramifications and should push us to begin asking a harder question: What does it mean to be at the “end of history,” and fine with it passing?
SOURCE/CREDIT: THE WASHIGTON POST
