Highlights
Birth rates are crashing around the world, and more countries are waking up to the reality that unless governments do something to change course, major population declines are ahead. Even so, it’s far less clear what should be done. Baby bonuses? Child allowances? Parental leave? Free child care? Promote religious schools? Ban social media? Free IVF? Which policies will work?
Our work at the IFS Pronatalism Initiative is aimed at answering that question. For us, “pronatalism” means advancing policies that actually have a good chance of increasing the birth rate. But that raises a lot of other questions—why do some policies work, while others do not? Isn’t childbearing a deeply personal, culturally influenced matter?
The Crowbar Model
In this post, I describe the theory that motivates our work at the IFS Pronatalism Initiative. When I talk about this framework to policymakers, I half-jokingly describe it as the “crowbar model.” If you want to move a heavy object, you usually need two things: something else heavy or strong to push or pull on it, and some way to get leverage on it. Falling fertility isn’t so different. It’s a very heavy object. All sorts of social and economic forces have conspired to reduce family sizes. Changes in health, gender relations, marriage patterns, educational patterns, shifts in religiosity, the rise of social media, contraception, abortion—the factors “weighing” on fertility are innumerable. Trying to roll back every possible force is daunting on many levels, not least because some are actually good: we wouldn’t want child mortality rates to return to premodern levels, or for literacy rates to decline, or for women’s hard-won legal equality to be rolled back!
Thus, we are left with a problem: we often can’t “reduce the weight,” i.e. undo the things that are reducing fertility. Instead, we’re left trying to “lift the burden,” and that’s very hard.
To succeed, we can’t just brute force our way through. It’s not enough to just repeatedly post on X about the harms of falling fertility, or to constantly ask our children when they’re going to give us grandchildren, or increase the child tax credit by $200. The “weight” of these interventions just isn’t enough to lift the burden on fertility on their own. Instead, we need to find some leverage. Pronatal policies, done right, should be that leverage.
What Policy Can’t Do
Before getting into the leverage pronatal policy can provide, it’s worth detailing the things that pronatal policy really cannot do and thus should not try to do.
Pronatal policy can’t substitute for the love parents have for their children, or guarantee that marriages are happy. Pronatal policy can’t even really provide people with reasons why kids are good, or why marriage is desirable. The simple reality is nobody has a baby “for the GDP.” A slightly bigger child tax credit or a higher reimbursement rate for child care will not give people a reason to have more children. There is virtually no policy imaginable that can do that! Raising kids takes enormous amounts of time, effort, and money, and no government policy, whether a financial benefit or a change in housing policy or anything else, is going to be able to eliminate the fact that having children requires some sacrifices. Policy can shift what kinds of sacrifices and their intensity, but policy will never actually fill the space of meaning and purpose parents need to justify the leap of faith involved in having kids.
The real powerhouse of pronatalism is intrinsic motivation to have children.
This being the case, pronatal policy really shouldn’t concern itself with persuading people to have kids. That’s not going to work. If somebody needs to be persuaded to have kids, they’re a bad target for pronatal policy. Rather, pronatal policy should be targeted at people who want kids, but don’t have them, or don’t have as many as they’d like to have. These people already have their own reasons to have kids. Across tens of thousands of respondents we have surveyed on these topics over the years, the reasons people give are widespread: they are excited and curious about what kind of person they’ll get from a combination of them and their spouse; they want to give their parents grandkids; they want to pass on a culture or faith or tradition; they just like kids and want their life to be full of kids, and many other reasons. It’s hard to effectively survey reasons people do want kids, because there are so many reasons, whereas the reasons not to have kids are usually from a short list: cost factors and family budget, time constraints related to work or leisure, life stage factors like being too old or not yet partnered, or anti-natal ideologies.
This reasoning is a big part of why we focus on the gap between desired fertility and birth rates. Public policy cannot substitute for the myriad intrinsic motivations people have for having kids. All public policy can do is nudge the considerations people make when deciding how to translate their beliefs into actions. Moreover, this reasoning implies that in countries or contexts where people don’t already have compelling reasons to want kids, pronatal policy won’t work very well even if it is attempted.
What Policy Can Do
It’s easy to see how some policies might do that work of nudging—a child allowance makes kids less expensive, so maybe helps people have kids earlier, or have more kids overall. Likewise, last year, we focused a lot of our work on housing policy, because it’s easy to see how not having an available bedroom might impact family formation.
But again, focusing just on these cost factors is a losing battle. Of course, we should try to offset the cost of parenting, since parenting generates huge benefits for society on the whole, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves that these cost adjustments are the sum total of pronatal policy. We’ll never succeed in offsetting enough costs to make parenting profitable.
Rather, we need to think about leverage. The real powerhouse of pronatalism is intrinsic motivation to have children. Sometimes, that motivation is related to a wider cultural group, or religion; sometimes, it’s related to other factors. As I already noted, motivations to have kids are extremely diverse.
But while diverse, they aren’t random. Religious beliefs shape fertility: so pronatal policy probably needs to be “leveraging” religious communities’ successful efforts to instill intrinsic motivations. Broader school choice, home-care allowances of the kinds Laestadian Lutherans use so heavily in Ostrobothnia, Finland, housing regulations friendly to co-religious co-residence near congregations, might all be important parts of public policy leveraging religious belief. A recent study found that extended parental leave boosted fertility in the Baltic countries—but only for religious families! To return to my analogy, we want to allow people with intrinsic fertility motivations (in these cases, the religious) to use public policy as the “crowbar” to lift low fertility rates.
Pronatal policies, done right, should provide leverage.
It's not just religion, of course. In much of east Asia, families place enormous value on continuing the family lineage, yet oppressive workplace norms immiserate workers, create absurdly competitive educational and work environments, and create unhappy family lives and low birth rates. Intrinsic familistic motivations to have children are stymied by 60-hour-in-office work weeks. Policies encouraging flexible work, remote work, job-sharing, and reduced hours expectations can be a “crowbar,” giving would-be parents leverage against overbearing bosses.
Recently, I wrote about how the growing popularity of international travel, especially for young women, might be reducing fertility. It’s unlikely the government can roll back the clock on travel being a high-status good. But policies making travel more family friendly, even explicitly favoring family-travelers, can give families a “crowbar” to get leverage and regain some of the social status they lost once their child was no longer a “lap-infant.”
Playground Pronatalists
And perhaps most importantly of all, every single person who cares about falling birth rates can use any pronatal policy at all as a “crowbar” in conversations with our loved ones. I cannot count how many times I have been talking to a friend at the playground, or church, or our homeschooling co-op(s), and they complain about how hard some part of parenting is (or how hard they expect it to be), and I can immediately spot how government policy contributed to making it hard. When governments choose to be forthrightly pronatal, rolling out policies left and right to support families, it helps all of us “playground pronatalists” respond to our friends. When these complaints come up, we can respond, “I hear you, that’s a real problem—but look, it’s actually getting solved, the city government just announced six new playgrounds,” or “They just replaced the stairs on the hiking path with a stroller-graded ramp,” or “They finally banned pit bulls from the unfenced side of the park,” or “Yes kids are expensive, but your child tax credit just went up by $1500/kid,” or “Traveling with kids is tricky—but at least now we’re guaranteed to be seated together, and there’s a playground in every terminal!”
Pronatal policy can’t replace intrinsic motivations to have kids. But it can give regular people a bit more leverage in conversations with their peers about family life, encouraging a more positive, hopeful outlook for fertility. There are no silver bullet pronatal policies that can fix every problem in one fell swoop. But once policymakers realize that pronatal policy exists to act as the multiplier for intrinsic fertility motivations rather than a replacement for them, it becomes a lot easier to start thinking about what kinds of pronatal policies might really work.
Lyman Stone is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
