How to Think About Birthrates: A Multi-factored Approach

The collapse in fertility is finally being recognized as one of the greatest crises we face.  If society does not produce enough children, it will slowly (or quickly) decline. But what is causing birthrates to fall? All sorts of answers come up: marriage is in decline; we lost religion; housing is the problem; education takes too long; and so on. But which of these is the true cause?

In fact, it is all these things. Demographers have worked hard over the years to evaluate these factors and more with good reason. People need to be motivated to have families: they usually want to have a reliable and committed partner, economic stability, a suitable home, and a plan for child care. And all this must happen while they are still young and fertile.

Our minds seek a silver bullet—a single clean solution—for falling birthrates. But that’s just not how fertility works. Studies find that many factors contribute to fertility rates. The more factors that tilt in fertility’s favor, the higher birthrates will be. Fertility, like economics, is a whole field of study. But unlike with economics, the principles of fertility have rarely been presented together. With that in mind, here is my view of the big elements at play, based on the work of countless demographers and journalists.

People need to be motivated to have families: they usually want to have a reliable and committed partner, economic stability, a suitable home, and a plan for child care. And all this must happen while they are still young and fertile.

Pronatal Beliefs: Elevating Having Children as a Cultural Value

Israel is the only developed country that has above-replacement fertility at nearly three births per woman. One factor in particular drives high Israeli fertility, among the religious and secular alike. Israeli culture places an extraordinary importance on having children, a fact that is reported by almost everyone who has studied Israel’s remarkable fertility. In short, Israelis have deeply held pro-natal beliefs.

The few countries that experienced strong rebounds from below replacement fertility to above replacement, like Kazakhstan and Mongolia, share this feature with Israel. Those two countries celebrate mothers of large families on a national level, and women there are considered higher status when they have more children.

But perhaps the biggest evidence of the power of pronatal belief comes from its opposite. Following scares about overpopulation after the publication of The Population Bomb, nations like Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and more recently Iran had anti-natal campaigns urging people to have fewer children. These campaigns were all immediately effective, causing fertility to plunge virtually overnight. What a culture says about having children has extraordinary power: this is something antinatalists understand well, but pronatalists have barely begun to grasp.

Marriage: The Ultimate Pronatal Social Technology

Western cultures are deeply tolerant and that is a good thing. We accept families however they come, as we should. Without the contribution of non-traditional families, fertility would be staggeringly low.

And yet marriage is the instrument more than any other through which men and women tie themselves together for the long project of raising children. Marriage culture matters tremendously for birth rates.

In fact, no country in the world manages to reach replacement fertility with low marriage rates, and this goes a long way to explaining low European fertility, despite pronatal policies in many countries.

Marriage age matters too. The ability to conceive is highest in the 20s and is quite low by age 40, and so delayed marriage too is a big driver of falling fertility.

Housing Suitable for Families: It’s Not Only Cost

It is axiomatic in demography that when countries urbanize, fertility falls. The lowest fertility rates in the world, between 0.4 to 0.7 births per woman, are seen in dense cities like Seoul, Shanghai and Bangkok, each a sea of high-rise apartment towers. In every country, fertility is lowest in urban cores.

Some claim the problem is cost. Yet rents are very cheap across Asia by western standards. The problem is the housing itself. High rise apartments are poorly suited for families. Most have few bedrooms, no yard to play in, and noisy kids bother the neighbors.

Single-family homes, by contrast, are associated with far higher fertility. America’s Baby Boom coincided with a huge housing transformation as America went from being a nation of urban renters to a nation of suburban homeowners.

We need to build much more housing so that it is affordable for young people. But as Asia shows us, cheap housing of the wrong type doesn’t help fertility and probably makes things worse. Housing, once built, lasts a long time, and if it is poorly suited for families, it will drag down birthrates for generations.

Faith: The Biggest Source of Pronatal Values

Religiosity, and especially religious attendance, is strongly associated with higher birthrates. Almost every high fertility group one can think of, from the Amish and traditional Catholics in the United States to Laestadian Lutherans in Finland, to orthodox Jews around the world have a religious basis.

There is no magic trick involved. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are associated with higher fertility because of teachings that urge people to have children, such as the biblical exhortation to ‘to forth and multiply.’ Buddhism lacks such teachings, and Buddhists have similar fertility to nonbelievers. It matters greatly what faith leaders teach about family. Famously, the Patriarch of Georgia was able to spark a baby boom by celebrating large families.

Other Influential Factors

Several other factors strongly impact fertility and need consideration as well. 

• Education duration. The more of a person’s fertile years are consumed by school, the lower their childbearing will be. Faster education tracks are essential.
• Work-life balance. Work-from-home is strongly pronatal while ‘workism’ that values work high above family is associated with very low fertility.
• Men’s earnings. Young men with low earnings are seen as poor marriage prospects by young women.
• Parenting norms. Too-high expectations around parenting lead many to have fewer children, or to avoid children altogether. 
• Gender tension. Where men refuse to help with domestic chores and child care, women often reject marriage or choose to have fewer children.
• Grandparent support/Alloparenting. Child care help and financial backstops positively impact fertility. 
• Sex-Ed. “Health class” is centered on contraception yet awareness of the fertility window is poor. Meanwhile, environmental lessons in school are tinged with antinatalism.
• Do adult children leave home? Where adult children live with their parents, fertility rates are much lower.
• C-sections. Excessively high rates of C-sections are associated with lower fertility across states and countries because C-sections tend to lower family size.
• Policy supports. Things like tax benefits, parental leave, and subsidized child care all seem to increase fertility in a meaningful way. A boost in TFR of just 0.1 to 0.3 makes an enormous difference with compounding.

Low fertility in society is a solvable problem, and the inputs are quite logical! But collectively, we need a full view of the factors that drive fertility, just as we know the principles of economics or biology. Further work will add to our understanding of the various factors and their importance, but such a multifactored analysis is surely the right approach. When the factors driving fertility are better understood, a huge array of answers to the problem of low birthrates present themselves, paving the way to a bright future full of children.

Daniel Hess is a pronatalist researcher, writer, and married father of six who operates the widely followed @MoreBirths X account and the MoreBirths.com website.