People say they want more children than they’re having. Is modern life stopping them—or have our ideas about a good life changed?
Falling birth rates don’t tell us how many people were discouraged from having children, and how many came to want a different kind of life.Illustration by Cristina Spanò
If you’ve followed the debate over falling birth rates in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that most of the fretting comes from the anti-feminist right. In recent years, Vice-President J. D. Vance has emerged as a cranky pro-natalist, deriding “childless cat ladies,” blaming “secular global liberalism” for population decline, and, in happier moments, as at an anti-abortion rally last year, declaring, “I want more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” eager to make and rear them. A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation earlier this year sounded the alarm over the drop in U.S. fertility, linking it to “second-wave feminism” and other familiar culture-war culprits: “casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce,” all of which menaced “the natural family,” which was helmed by a heterosexual husband and wife. Many of these voices agree with the determinedly fecund Elon Musk (at least fourteen kids and counting), who has said, “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Recent polling shows that, among the growing percentage of Americans who think we should be at least somewhat worried about the birth rate, men worry more than women, and Republicans more than Democrats.
Running through this conversation is a theory about what people want. A big reason people have fewer children, the argument goes, is that they no longer want them enough. Feminism, secularism, individualism, and sexual freedom have weakened the old attachments to marriage and family. In this account, the explanation is largely cultural.
Another story about falling fertility, however, begins from almost the opposite premise: plenty of people still want children, often more than they wind up having. What has changed are the social and economic conditions people need to create the families they’d hoped to have. Housing is ruinously expensive. Child care is costly, too. Jobs are demanding and insecure. Finding a reliable partner can feel harder than ever. From this perspective, the fertility slump is a record of frustrated longing.
Anna Louie Sussman, the author of “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty” (Dey Street), forcefully makes this second case. She is not a social conservative or a soapbox pro-natalist. The censorious baby boosters at Heritage would not be fans of the way she chose to reproduce. Sussman, a single journalist in New York, travelled to Bologna to retrieve eggs that she’d frozen there six years earlier, when she was thirty-four (egg freezing was cheaper in Europe), then flew to another European city, charged about three thousand dollars to her credit card for an embryo-transfer procedure (it would have cost about fifteen thousand dollars in the U.S.), and got pregnant. Her gay best friend, Anthony, became her daughter’s adoptive father, and his parents joined a small, devoted community of caregivers for their child.
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Sussman nevertheless shares Vance and Musk’s conviction that something has gone seriously wrong when so few babies are being born. She just views the shortage as symptomatic of societal woes that conservatives have little to say about: the costs of housing, health care, and higher education; fear of a climate-changed future; feelings of precarity, immediate and anticipated; and obstacles to finding a potential co-parent. She largely attributes these phenomena to the workings of modern capitalism on our bank accounts and psyches. She is less concerned with the birth rate per se than with the experience of forgoing children. She is not, she writes, “arguing for people to have more or fewer children, or about the importance of children for economic purposes”—shoring up tax bases, saving pension systems, and the like.
What troubles Sussman is the gap between how many kids people say they want and how many are born. A 2025 U.N. study asked fourteen thousand people across fourteen countries how many children they wanted and how many they expected to have. Most wanted two; not even four in ten expected to achieve that. A Gallup poll that year showed something similar among Americans surveyed: forty per cent said that having two children was optimal, and twenty-seven per cent said three. (That’s roughly in line with results from previous decades.) But at current rates many families won’t get there.
“When so many people hesitate to have children,” Sussman writes, “what is lost is not simply future taxpayers or consumers. We miss out on the rich relationships that bond us across generations, on the flood of love and tenderness that caring for children, or simply being around them, can unleash.” She adds that the “retreat from parenthood also encapsulates a dissatisfaction with our present so extreme it has become a vote against the future.”
The scale of the fertility decline makes the issue hard to dismiss. Global fertility rates fell from an average of about five births per woman in the nineteen-sixties to 2.2 in 2024. Most countries, representing about seventy per cent of the world’s population, have rates below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. In the United States, the rate is now 1.6. In South Korea—where dog strollers outsell baby strollers, and playgrounds and elementary-school classrooms can be eerily empty—it is below one. In the U.S., almost half of women aged thirty are childless, compared with eighteen per cent in 1976.
So who has the better analysis of what is happening? Have people’s priorities changed, or has building the families they hoped for become more onerous? If millions still want children but are discouraged from having them, then the fertility slump marks a substantial social failure. And there is plenty in contemporary life to bolster Sussman’s case.
Consider what parenthood now asks of people. A big part of the story is the shift toward what the economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine describe as “much more resource and time-intensive” parenting. Many young adults who started families in the past twenty years were raised this way, which shaped their own conceptions of how to rear children. If families want to invest in extracurriculars and a college education for their children, while lavishing time and attention on them, then doing so for five, rather than, say, one or two, may seem impossible.
Time-use studies have shown a steady increase since the nineteen-seventies in the hours that parents in rich countries devote to child care. Millennial mothers and fathers in the United States spend more time tending to their offspring than Gen X-ers did. Recently, as I was reading research papers on declining birth rates, an unfamiliar finding glinted up at me like a penny on the sidewalk. In countries where male involvement in child care and housework is highest—Norway, for example—male parents tend to oppose having additional children. You might see this as a bummer: Mr. Moms overwhelmed by ordinary domestic duties. Or you might see it, as I did, as evidence that men who participate more actively in such tasks develop a healthy respect for what they require.
Turning to South Korea, contemporary demographers’ favorite example of a reproductive desert, Sussman examines one particularly punishing form of souped-up child rearing: the culture of hagwon, or afternoon and evening cram schools. These institutions are de rigueur for children hoping to reach university in a hypercompetitive system, and they require parents, almost exclusively mothers, to collect their exhausted, fact-stuffed kids late at night, up to six days a week. People in Seoul told Sussman that the system had turned them against parenting: they felt unable to avoid hagwon and unwilling to subject future children to it.
For many would-be parents, the demands of child rearing are not the first hurdle. Before having kids, they want to find someone to raise them with. Here, too, Sussman assembles a formidable catalogue of impediments. Dating apps are too much like online shopping. (There’s some overlap here with the Heritage Foundation’s critique of dating apps, which similarly targets their profit-driven, algorithmic incentives for “continuous scrolling and swiping,” as its family report puts it.) Plastic surgery and inflationary beauty standards impose dizzying upkeep. A surfeit of online porn scrambles young men’s expectations of sex. And social media encourages “relentless packaging and marketing of the self.” A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that thirty-five per cent of never married, single American adults hadn’t ever been in a committed romantic relationship. In a 2024 survey, eighty per cent of singles reported “emotional fatigue or burnout” from online dating. The research shows, Sussman says, that the biggest reason women choose to freeze their eggs is that they haven’t found the right partner. “At a time when we have more social and sexual freedom than at any point in history,” she writes, “it can feel harder than ever to find genuine connection.”
Sussman’s portraits both illustrate and complicate these diagnoses, as individuals tend to. In a chapter about dating, she introduces Michaela, who, in her late thirties, is dating “more diligently than anyone I know,” mostly through apps. Michaela is multilingual, outgoing, and, Sussman tells us, “tall and voluptuous, with lush, dark eyelashes.” She is an Ivy League graduate and business owner who wants a partner and a child but has gone on some two hundred dates without luck. By the book’s end, though, she does find a partner, IRL, and has a baby with him. She told a stranger on a train that she was single, and the woman introduced her to an American living in the South of France. It would have been fan service to tell us more about the romance, but this is all we get. Another subject in the book, Marwan, also wants to be a parent, and gets many online matches when he lists his job as a McKinsey consultant. But when he quits to start his own firm and makes time for friends, reading, sports, and volunteering, his profile draws much less interest. He is still “tall and handsome, with a gregarious smile,” and an Oxford Ph.D., according to Sussman—but “self-employed” is evidently a turnoff. (Message to Marwan: I know some delightful women for whom “McKinsey” would be the turnoff.)
Yet the closer you look at the gap between desired and actual fertility, the harder it is to know what it measures. Some parents probably change their minds without much regret after one or two children—content with the family they’ve created, persuaded by the solidity and particularity of its configuration that it, not some theoretical alternative, is right, or sobered by child rearing’s demands (perhaps a child has special needs). The South Korean example suggests a related possibility. Hagwon culture is a grim version of a more benign, mutually rewarding form of cultivated, small-batch parenting—one in which adults and children know one another well because they’ve spent time trying to, parents foster their kids’ interests and eccentricities, and people find in family life what the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch called a haven from the heartless world.
More tellingly, wanting two or three children already represents a domestic vision far removed from the teeming households of pioneer families, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” or even “The Brady Bunch.” The fact that people want smaller families than they once did isn’t necessarily a vote against the future. It’s a vote against past family sizes, from eras when more people relied on children for labor, expected extras to make up for ravening child mortality, or felt religiously bound to multiply bountifully. (These motivations persist even in affluent countries, such as among Orthodox Jewish families in the United States and Israel. But Mormons are having fewer children; Utah’s birth rate has declined more than any other state’s, by thirty-seven per cent since 2007.) In the 2025 Gallup poll, only eleven per cent of Americans surveyed said that four kids was ideal, and just four per cent said five.
“Inconceivable” is not a policy book; it’s a reported social critique sauced with stories. Inevitably, though, Sussman touches on what societies might do, or have tried to do, in order to arrest falling fertility. As she suggests, and as recent studies demonstrate, interventions aimed at boosting birth rates—such as tax credits or baby bonuses—tend to have modest or short-term effects. Eleven Swiss cantons have introduced birth allowances over the years, and one study found that the payments increased fertility, mainly among lower-income immigrants, but the effect quickly faded. When Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, devoted about five per cent of its G.D.P. to an elaborate system of family subsidies, the spending seemed to stabilize the average age at which women first gave birth. But it had little effect on over-all fertility; mainly, it nudged people into having the children they would have had anyway, just a little earlier.
Other policies that might be expected to hike the birth rate by making it easier to combine work and family life often have transitory or relatively small effects, too. In the nineteen-eighties, Sweden extended a provision in its family-leave system that rewarded parents for having another child relatively soon after the previous one, and many did so. The result, as the economists Kearney and Levine report, was “a temporary baby boom, that was subsequently offset by a baby bust.” Of all the family-friendly policies, spending on early-childhood education and child care appears to do the most to goose birth rates—especially when aligned with the right leave policies. But, according to a U.N. report, child-care provision is “more likely to influence the fertility behavior of highly educated women, who are more active in the labor market.” And, for those of us still capable of being surprised at how hard and costly it can be to budge human behavior, the numbers are a little underwhelming: in one study, every extra percentage point of G.D.P. spent on early-childhood education and child care was “associated with 0.2 extra children per woman.”
The unfettered free market of the U.S. certainly hasn’t boosted birth rates—but neither have Scandinavia’s generous social guarantees. Birth rates have plunged in social democracies and capitalist autocracies alike. Norway and the U.S. are about equally fecund. “Strong family policies and social supports,” Sussman writes, “are just a baseline. They should ensure that if and when someone would like to become a parent, they do not face job loss, financial ruin, or catastrophic health bills, and that children and their parents have enough to eat and quality child care if parents want to work. But they are no longer themselves capable of producing the conditions under which people want to, or choose to, have children.”
That qualification seems significant. If making parenthood materially easier does little to restore birth rates, perhaps some part of the fertility decline reflects a change in what people want from their lives. Fewer people consider marriage and children indispensable to a rewarding adulthood. In a 2023 Pew poll, seventy-one per cent of American adults said that an enjoyable job or career was very important to a fulfilling life, whereas only twenty-six per cent said children and twenty-three per cent marriage. (Sixty-one per cent said close friends.)
Sussman is inclined to see such preferences as further evidence of capitalism’s moral failings. I’m sympathetic. Loving your work is great, but career obsession can be its own form of sterility; corporations aren’t people, and most employers would sooner lay you off than understand your ineffable you-ness. Sussman cites one study in which women who had substantial student-loan debt were around forty per cent less likely to have kids than those who didn’t carry debt. That seems bleak, too.
But the poll’s answers can also point to a genuinely enlarged sense of what a satisfactory life might contain. People can experience love and tenderness for younger generations without biological parenthood, as any devoted aunt or teacher can attest. They can build lives around friendship, work, art, travel, activism, or community, in ways less constrained by old ideas about virtuous adulthood. Some changes associated with lower fertility are plainly gains. Teen-pregnancy rates have dropped dramatically, women have far more educational and professional opportunities, and social norms that stigmatized childlessness have loosened. (For a horrified laugh, check out a 1968 episode called “Spinsters” from the BBC documentary series “Man Alive,” on YouTube. Sample line of narration, about an unmarried woman in her thirties: “She fills her life with activities which some might call substitutes—she paints and is learning the classical guitar.”)
So it makes sense to be cautious about treating peoples’ stated preferences about children as a kind of buried truth, and the gap between what people say they want and what they wind up having as chiefly a measure of the obstacles placed in their way. Having a child is the most overdetermined of choices: intimate, nearly instinctual, and yet deeply embedded in cultural norms and social structures. That makes the birth rate a particularly inadequate barometer of whether a given family policy is worthwhile. The reason to institute strong family supports—for example, to have a national policy offering paid leave for new mothers and fathers in the United States, the one wealthy country that does not do so—isn’t because they act like levers to push out more babies. It’s because they make people’s lives better, and societies kinder, more equitable, and more forbearing.
Every time I read about declining fertility—whether it’s a right-wing pro-natalist screed about permissive, secular culture; an earnest, progressive account of how contemporary capitalism constrains our most fundamental choices while presenting a simulacrum of infinite options; or, for that matter, a sober statistical analysis from the O.E.C.D.—I realize that I can’t quite imagine the combination of forces that would reverse the worldwide trend toward fewer babies and smaller families. So many modern humans seem to want many things at once: children, autonomy, absorbing work, a certain standard of parenting, and a particular sort of romantic partner. The fertility rate reflects the priorities that emerge when decisions have to be made. Economic factors play a role, but culture plays a larger one and is less amenable to policy interventions. Culture encompasses ideas about what adulthood should entail, what parents owe their children, how much sacrifice family should require, how parents and other caregivers should divide their child-rearing duties, and whether having children makes a life bigger or smaller.
Those ideas can’t be legislated into existence, yet institutions, social movements, customs, and habits can shape them over time. Norms do shift, sometimes unpredictably, as people watch one another live. If smaller families arose partly from changing ideas about a good life, we can’t assume that those ideas have reached their final form. The postwar American baby boom itself reversed a century-long decline in family size. Whether or not we see another baby boom, my vote is for giving up on policies aimed at coaxing or prodding people into having children, and for making family life easier for the people—and they will always be with us—who dearly want them. ♦
