5 reasons more millennials are choosing not to have children
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- American women have been having fewer babies for years, falling in line with worldwide trends.
- The economic uncertainty of two recessions, climate change, and expensive childcare are to blame.
- Women are also finding other fulfilling paths and some just aren't interested in having kids.
The pandemic may not have brought on as much of a baby bust as predicted, but it's not about to prompt a baby boom either.
Birth rates and fertility rates have been steadily declining for the past eight years. Today, people of childbearing age, many of whom are millennials, are delaying having children — or not having them at all. It's a trend that's bringing the US in line with the rest of the world as high-income countries, and increasingly middle-income ones, have long seen women delaying their first child until later ages compared to American women.
Since 1950, the worldwide fertility rate dropped from an average of 4.7 children to 2.4 children. Fertility rates in the US peaked in 2007, before declining in 2008 during the Great Recession and accelerating its slump when the pandemic hit. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report last year found that the US birth rate fell by 4% from 2019 to 2020, the sharpest single-year decline in almost 50 years, and the lowest number of births since 1979.
Various factors explain this, from increased contraception to fear of bringing a child into a world with a changing climate. Chief among them is an expensive economy riddled by a pandemic and that lacks affordable childcare, coinciding with decades of progress for professional women as choosing to be child-free becomes less of a taboo.
Here are five reasons why millennials are having fewer babies.
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Economic progress has caused the opportunity cost of having kids to increase. Women have more options than ever when it comes to how to spend their time, money, and energy.
As Christine Percheski, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, told Insider, the declining birth rate is "about women having access to education and employment opportunities. It's about the rise in individualism. It's about the rise in women's autonomy and a change in values."
Trends in the 21st-century economy — especially the rise of dating apps — have combined with a higher level of education and more career opportunities for women to push marriage and childbearing so far off that it sometimes never materializes. Millennial women are about four times as likely as women from the Silent generation to have completed as much education at the same age.
The more educated a woman gets, the more likely she is to postpone having a child until her 30s. While that's partly explained by student debt, it's also because women today have more life options than women did 50 years ago.
It's opened up new areas for fulfillment. As Gina Tomaine wrote for Philly Mag, millennials like to be unencumbered and their economic experiences have made them question what makes a successful, meaningful life.
"Maybe a full, rich life is one that's overflowing with creativity, travel, exploration — all stuff that kids make more difficult," she pondered.
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Finances are one of the top reasons American millennials aren't having kids or are having fewer kids than they considered ideal. Long dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Recession while juggling student debt and soaring costs for things like housing and healthcare, they simply can't afford it — or at least want to wait until they feel caught up financially.
It doesn't help that America is in the midst of a childcare affordability crisis. Raising a child to age 18 in America will cost parents an average of $230,000, with most of those costs in the first few years of the child's life.
National childcare costs average between $9,000 and $9,600 annually, per advocacy organization Child Care Aware. That's unaffordable for 63% of full-time working parents in the US. Should a parent choose to leave the workforce, per research from left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, they risk losing up to three to four times their salary in lifetime earnings for every year they miss.
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Recessions typically have the strongest economic influence on birth and fertility rates. "People tend to wait during periods of political and social unrest," Percheski said.
The Great Recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis saw a 9% decline in births, per Brookings — about 400,000 babies fewer than there would have been otherwise. While the Spanish Flu only resulted in an economic contraction, that public health crisis also led to a drop in births.
A pandemic lumps together economic and health turmoil, which brings about even greater uncertainty. That's not to mention the added stress of parenting a child learning remotely from home while juggling remote work.
Brookings recently found that there have been 60,000 fewer births so far during the pandemic, less of a drop than expected, although data for children conceived during the first pandemic winter still isn't available.
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A recent Pew Research Center Survey revealed that of childless adults who think they won't have kids, 5% cited environmental reasons as a factor in their decision. And a Morning Consult poll of 4,400 Americans found that one in four childless adults say climate change influenced their reproductive decisions.
Young adults who said climate change is affecting their reproductive decision-making were uncertain about the future and worried about overpopulation and overconsumption, per a separate study from the University of Arizona.
Just ask Josephine Ferorelli, founder of Conceivable Future, a network that hosts house parties for people to discuss the threat of climate change to reproduction, who told The New York Times last year she saw an uptick in interest from prospective parents.
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A new study by the Pew Research Center surveyed over 3,800 Americans ages 18 to 49. It found that among non-parents in this cohort, 44% said it's not too likely or not likely at all they'll have kids someday. That's up by 7 percentage points from the 37% of childless adults who said the same in 2018.
More than half of this group (56%) just doesn't want kids.
Among adults surveyed who are already parents, nearly three-quarters say they're unlikely to have more kids, which Pew says is "virtually unchanged" since 2018. Similar to their childless counterparts, most said they just don't want more kids.
It's the latest finding in an ongoing dialogue that has been destigmatizing not having kids. The Guardian recently explored the choice of a child-free life in an essay series, and some mothers have even shared regrets about having children.