NewsWire: 7/14/21
- What’s more common: people who wish they had fewer children, or people who wish they had more? A new study examines this important question as more voices weigh in on the forces behind falling fertility rates. (Institute for Family Studies)
- NH: Dire headlines about low fertility rates have given rise to a particular genre of op-ed: pieces by authors who argue that this isn’t actually a problem. See this, for example, by Millennial author Jill Filipovic. The title: “Women Are Having Fewer Babies Because They Have More Choices.”
- It’s true that many women choose not to have children. For them, it isn’t a reflection of financial hardship or any other factor; they simply don’t want them. In her piece, Filipovic cites the fact that birthrates are dropping most among women “who have the most advantage and the greatest range of choices, and whose prospects look brightest.” She says that what we're seeing reflects the fact that women feel freer to choose various paths related to motherhood: having kids later, fewer kids, or no kids.
- But is this correct? Yes, women are having children at later and later ages--but as we've shown repeatedly (see "So Much for the 'Tempo Effect'"), this is not making up for the declines in births at younger ages. Filipovic's piece thus hinges on the claim that a rising share of young women today do not want any kids or fewer kids, period.
- It's a provocative claim. To assess it, we need to find some relevant data.
- That's where this new survey from the Institute of Family Studies comes in. It provides the foundation that’s missing from all the op-ed opining: actual numbers reflecting what Americans want. Do people in fact have the number of children they wish to have? (Note that the respondents here were not limited to women, but all Americans. While it would be ideal to have gender-split data, these numbers still offer some insight.)
- When asked about their feelings about having children, 19% of Americans aged 18 to 74 said they don’t have kids and are not interested in having them.
- About a third (34%) have kids and are happy with the number of kids they have.
- Yet the biggest total share (37%) wish they had more children. They either have kids already and wish they had more (24%), or do not have them and want to (13%).
- While the original survey polled Americans of all ages, the researchers also isolated the results for respondents of childbearing age (18 to 44).
- The second chart is revealing. When you compare the all-ages chart to the Millennial/Gen X chart, you see that it’s younger cohorts who are less likely to say they’re not interested in having children. It’s older people who are more likely to wish they didn’t have kids or had fewer of them. This puts the rest the idea that it’s younger people who are aspiring to lead child-free lives.
- It would be great to compare these survey results over time and see how the responses have changed. Alas, the researchers can't provide us with any time series data. But just to get a sense of what these numbers mean in a historical context, we can compare today's survey results with historical Census tallies, going back to back over a century, on women's completed fertility.
- So let's compare. Again: According to this recent survey, 19% of all Americans today neither have nor want to have any kids, while 12% of younger age brackets say the same. The chart below, based on Census surveys tabulated in this 2015 paper, shows the total number of children that women from different birth cohorts actually had at any age over 40. The lowest share of women who never had children is around 10% (among those born in the 1940s), while the highest share is around 23% (among those born in the 1910s). 12% is on the low end. It would put Millennials and late-wave Gen Xers on par with Silent Generation couples--often, their grandparents who got married young in the 1950s.
- To be sure, there's more going on here that the historical numbers can't show. They do not account for women who may have wanted kids but, due to fertility problems, could not have them. This discrepancy may explain about 5 to 10 percentage points of the gap. We also don't know how that fertility gap has changed over time. On the one hand, the efficacy of fertility treatment has greatly improved in recent decades. On the other, there is evidence that the baseline rate of population infertility has been rising, possibly for environmental reasons (see "Coming Soon... Children of Men?").
- Still, the IFS survey adds a much-needed perspective to all these debates surrounding the birthrate. While the declining fertility rate may in part be driven by a rising share of women who want no kids or fewer kids, the surprisingly large share of couples--especially younger couples--who want more kids suggests that much of the decline is not, in fact, by choice.
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