A Childish Issue

In a world where media often use terms like “unprecedented” and other superlatives, it is easy to become so jaded you miss when something truly world-changing is occurring right before your eyes. Especially when those same media ignore it, or trivialize it. Yet something momentous and ominous is happening all around the world, and most people seem unaware. But not you, at least not anymore!

Throughout all human history, the total population has grown (see the chart)^*. It is as close to a given as one gets in social science. Demographers liked to say “demography is destiny” because it was a limiting factor. If you had an imaginary country with a population of ten people, and you wanted it to grow, the most people you could have in nine months was nineteen (one man and nine women, each pregnant, resulting in a growth of nine in nine months). If you chose nine men and one woman, the growth rate would be far less (in fact, the nine men would kill each other rather quickly).

In the last one-hundred and fifty years, human population exploded as improvements in medicine, health, and social services decreased child mortality and increased general longevity. While there are a few countries which have bucked the overall trend (Ireland, for example, still hasn’t recovered from the potato famine!), in general, countries have experienced rapid growth. In the United States today, there are two Americans for every one alive when I was born in 1960. So it was fair to bet that in developing public policy (or anything else), you could count on more people in the long run.

As living longer and having children survive childhood became probabilities rather than possibilities, social scientists noticed that birth rates started dropping. In the chart, it’s the area at the far right where the steep curve rounds off. The original assumption was that more wealth equated to more children, as the couple could afford them. But what happened was always and everywhere fewer children: in decadent European countries, in developing nations, in democracies and dictatorships, in states which demanded more children or even paid mothers to have more children. While some policies seemed to help for a time, in the end, the bottom continued to drop out of the human population growth trend. Some welcomed this trend, convinced earth was in danger of human overpopulation, lack of resources, and eventual exhaustion. For most people it simply meant they could plan for one perfect child (rather than adapt to many unplanned ones) and focus all their attention thereupon.

This trend remains unchanged in liberal, social democratic Scandinavia where parenting is egalitarian, in male-dominated (some might say misogynistic) east Asian cultures, and everywhere else. Some countries have experienced this trend for so long it is starting to show up as a domestic policy challenge. In a place like Italy or South Korea, the population pyramids (so called because there were always more youths than old people) are becoming inverted. Now there are four grandparents, two parents, and one child/grandchild. Since all these people are alive at the same time, and many of the couples are divorced, there can be four houses (usually in small villages) being inherited by the couple (living in the big city) to pass on to a grandchild. And so on. But also six people counting on the earnings of one later-adult for their government support!

In Japan, they are re-purposing neighborhood schools as old-age rec centers. Villages across Europe are simply dying. China’s government is flipping from its former strict one-child policy to something just short of mandatory child-bearing (real Handmaid’s Tale stuff there). Even in the United States, our system of Social Security was based on a constantly growing population, which no longer is. Seniors cost more in terms of health care, and the longer they live, the more social security they cost (and few people realize that the FICA taxes they paid are exhausted within a few years of applying for social security; after that, you’re receiving and spending other people’s money). This is a problem which will pass with the baby-boomer generation, but that’s like waiting for a stone to pass, if you get my drift.

As I noted earlier, this trend toward a single or no child has been resistant to all those policies tried by a variety of governments, so it is indeed a sticky trend that crosses cultures. In the United States, immigration has provided continued population growth, but we are at historically high levels with the resultant stresses on the body politic, so that won’t work in the long run. Other countries won’t even attempt it. While governments flounder, everybody is asking the same question: why?

In the States, there are ample data to suggest some reasons. First off, it was only economically sane to have children prior to modernity, when they were the only form of old-age social security. You had six kids, hoping three might survive to adulthood, so they could take care of you and your spouse should you live long enough. And people did live into old age: the notion everybody used to die by forty years old is simply wrong. But once modernity happened, you no longer needed to have six kids to get three adults, and the government provides social security. Why have kids, who always, always, always decrease your resources?

One set of answers was religious/civic. In the West, Christianity provided the maxim “be fruitful and multiply.” Having children was seen not only as fulfillment of the Lord’s covenant, but also a part of the civic commitment: we believe in our country, so we want it to continue. There is at least a temporal link between the gradual end of religiosity in the West and drop in fertility. But it can’t be the sole reason, since the decrease also occurred in non-Christian and even formally atheistic lands.

Likewise, for millennia women were relegated to duties in the home (like raising the many children) or poorly-paid service jobs (maids, chefs, teachers, etc.) There were few attractive alternatives to being a stay-at-home mother, and great social pressure to do so (“aren’t you ready to start a family yet?”) Modernity brought contraception (and its omnipresent cousin, legal abortion), more education and better job or even career possibilities for women. More importantly, the cultural views of womanhood changed.

While the reigning narrative is all about women’s choices (in whether to marry, have kids, control their fertility, choose a career, etc.), in fact the narrative is decidedly lopsided: neutral at best about marriage, pro-career, anti-motherhood. Think I am overstating the case? Look at cultural icons: they are “emancipated” women with full-time careers, “girl-bosses” leaning in to the same challenges men do, women who don’t necessarily need a partner and can do it all. If they have any, they have only one child. These are the people held up for all to admire. Likewise, women staying at home and raising a family of three or more are generally derided, even by causal acquaintances in public! Visit their far-less-popular websites and there you’ll see stories of how people feel free to walk up and tell them to stop having so many kids, or ask smugly, “you do know why this happens, don’t you?” It was supposed to be a choice, but now it’s a choice in name only.

Those cultural icons are having one child, so what’s the problem? Are they any less of a mom because they work outside the home? No way to tell, is there? There are great career moms and terrible stay-at-home moms. Same for the reverse. Same for dads. But all those couples having one child gets to the root of the problem. The measure of how many children a woman has on average over her lifetime is called the total fertility rate or TFR. To keep a steady population in a modern society, it needs to be about 2.2. Right now the US is at 1.79, meaning one is all the children these women are ever going to have. You don’t need to have an advanced math background to see that two parents resulting in one child will not maintain the population.

When American couples are asked why they have no or only one child, the answers always begin with something like this wording: “it’s not that we’re selfish, but . . .” The rest is usually either it’s too expensive or there isn’t enough time with two careers. The rationalization is obvious in the opening phrase, but is also consistent throughout. See, most of these couples will have one child, and every child is a net negative when it comes to your income, your time commitments and your loyalties. It is never an economically rational choice. So why have even one or why not stop at one?

Sometimes there is a time element invoked, as in, “we would like to have children (note the plural) later when our careers and finances can afford us to do it right.” Yet the data show that doesn’t happen in general. It gets harder biologically, financially, career-wise, and personality-wise to change family size and dynamics later in life. Some social scientists and policy officials think that economics is the key, and if we only had more financial support (free child care, free maternity care, more paid time-off, better family housing and the like) the issue would resolve. But social democratic governments have tried these measures with no positive results. No amount of government support will mask the burden of child-raising.

It comes back to culture, and the clue was in the “not selfish” line. The culture has twisted the concept of parenthood into something more like an apprenticeship. When parents had many children, they expected some to live, some to die. They expected some to be more successful, some less so. They expected success to be defined in different ways (back then, often in different ways for women and men, but the concept holds). Nowadays, many parents see having children as requiring the money, the time, the house, the job, the child-care, the tutors, the camps, the sports leagues, the private music lessons, and the enrichment activities to be successful in life: rich, educated, well-off. They hover (“helicopter parents”) over their charges, supervising all aspects (“play-dates”), demanding special accommodations in school and even engaging with their (adult!) child’s prospective employers! By their own accounts, it is financially, emotionally, and temporally exhausting. But it is driven by a notion of success that is not universal, nor even practical. It results in sustained pressure in childhood, family stress, and limitations rather than opportunities. And that is where we are today.

This standard of “success” is universal, artificial, personal, and entirely tangible. Universal as while it differs in degree (what counts in India might be different than America), it is happening all over the world. Artificial in that it is relatively new and there is no apparent reason for it. Personal in that it pertains to MY children, and what happens to yours or our society is secondary. And finally tangible as it deals with money, fame, or power, but not necessarily happiness, contentment, or satisfaction. Those goals are thought to be ensured by the means of education, career, and wealth.

In America, not well.

You might have seen this issue alluded to in the media as a result of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies.” That was poorly-worded, if accurate. One fact-checker pointed out that childless cat ladies are indeed a die-hard set of Democratic party voters. But his language was more an attempt to “Pwn the libs” than to initiate an intelligent discussion. Likewise, social media memes which attribute any such concern to a desire for some type of patriarchal imposition of the Handmaid’s Tale are just as useless. The issue is real and thoughtful people from economist Nicolas Eberstadt to progressives like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein have also highlighted it.

Women report record levels of disappointment despite solid gains in income, freedom, and career. Children have record levels of anxiety, drug treatments, suicidal tendencies, drug use (especially marijuana), and self-harm. Men are increasingly withdrawn and avoid commitments. Divorce rates are down, but only because marriage rates have collapsed. Free to have a family without a husband, women find it ridiculously stressful (who’d have thought?).

Now a stagnant or declining population does not necessarily mean disaster. The problem is our nations, our governments, and our societies were based on a growing population, and that’s not the case any more. We can make some generalizations. First, all the changes will take place over decades, but they will accelerate over time. So what seems like an inconvenience at first soon becomes a crisis. Infrastructure will need to be repurposed or reduced. Government services will have to be reduced. There will be less innovation, as there will be fewer people to spark it. Some areas (counties? towns? cities?) may simply need to be abandoned. Concepts like national defense may need to be re-thought, as finding people willing to risk death in defense of a “dying” culture is a difficult proposition.

Or we’ll need to re-evaluate what it means to have children. What it means to be a parent. What it means for them (and us) to be “successful.” Why go through the economic dislocation and the worrying? Why care about the nation, the village, the family? As our age demands, there are plenty of choices here. But as our age rejects, choices have consequences. Choose wisely!

*During periods like the Black Death, it is probable the human population stagnated or decreased slightly for a few years or a decade. No one knows for sure how many people died, or even what the population in some regions of the world was at the time. But the overall trend over time was always up.