Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start their family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.
They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates. “We felt like we had worked hard on ourselves, making sure that our finances and our health and everything was in order,” she told me when we spoke last August. “And those plans are on pause right now because everything is — it’s just impossible to know.”
With their stable jobs and supportive marriage, the Riveras are exactly the kind of people demographers would expect to be well on their way to parenthood today. Researchers who study population trends have shown that births tend to rise when economies are on the upswing, and more recently have proposed a relationship between gender roles and the birthrate: Very high levels of equality in the home and in society are associated with more births. (The same goes for very low levels of gender equality.) Yet in most places around the world, birthrates have marched steadily downward for the past two decades, even where economies have grown and working women’s male partners handled more household tasks. The Riveras may point to why.
The collective reluctance to procreate is perhaps most glaring in the Nordic countries. With their stable economies, strong social safety nets, robust family policies and equitable gender relations, they maintained relatively high birthrates through the early 2000s. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.
This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families. Government support for parents can help, but overall, people are having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits; moreover, the trend holds among those who are struggling to make ends meet and among those who, like the Riveras, have advanced degrees and salaried jobs. What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.
The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.
Even declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.” Zoomers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.
Daniele Vignoli, a demographer at the University of Florence, had been cautiously optimistic in 2008 when Italy’s fertility rate reached nearly 1.5 births per woman — still far below the 2.1 that is typically necessary to keep population levels stable in the absence of immigration, but the highest rate since the 1980s. “We were all celebrating this new spring of fertility, this new spring of demography in Italy,” he recalled. Then the Great Recession hit and fertility declined not just in Italy, where today it stands at under 1.2, but all over Europe.
No existing demographic theory could explain the near uniformity of this decline across the continent, which continued irrespective of how deeply a country was affected by the recession or how swiftly it recovered. It became clear to Mr. Vignoli that structural factors such as employment status or the housing market, while important context, do not tell the whole story of where people see themselves in the future. Raising children is an inherently forward-looking project, and in Mr. Vignoli’s analysis, increasing exposure to a volatile global economy and accelerating technological change makes it hard for young people to project a path forward with even a modest degree of confidence.
In one study, Mr. Vignoli and his co-authors found that though people’s current job situation — whether they had long-term or only temporary employment — influenced their decision to become a parent, equally influential was their sense of their future prospects, and whether, if this job went away, they could find another at comparable pay. That sense is a function of both real-world conditions and individual temperament — “resilience toward unexpected outcomes,” as Mr. Vignoli puts it.
To understand current population shifts, then, we must look further than just the indicators that researchers in other contexts have referred to as the “shadow of the past” — is someone employed? Married? College-educated? We must also consider what have been called the “shadows of the future.”
Doing so helps to explain why certain longstanding patterns are beginning to change. American women with less education tend to have more children than their more educated peers. That was true in the era before birth control became available and marriage ceased to be effectively compulsory, but it was also true afterward, when women had more choices. Researchers theorized that motherhood actually reduced uncertainty for young low-income mothers, even in their precarious circumstances, because it gave them a defined and valued social role, with clear responsibilities and an identifiable path.
The decline in births after the Great Recession affected women of all education levels, but between 2007 and 2016, it was steeper among American women without college degrees, whose births dropped 12 percent below projections, according to an analysis by the demographer Lyman Stone. That’s an estimated 3.1 million “missing” births in that cohort alone. Among women with graduate degrees, births dropped by just 7 percent from 2007 levels. Reproduction fell most precipitously among nonwhite women, especially Hispanic and Native American women, who earn less, on average, than white women. As with any sweeping social change, more than one factor is at work, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the anxiety of bringing a child into such an uncertain world may increasingly outweigh the appeal of motherhood.
The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential. “It changed the world,” said Chiara Ludovica Comolli, a demography professor at the University of Bologna. It “produced such levels of inequalities that the relationship between people and between groups, it was completely altered.”
Ms. Comolli has been studying how economic uncertainty rippled through the social sphere, eroding social trust and spurring the rise of radical right-wing parties, and how those changes in turn affect fertility. In Sweden, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats have talked about protecting the family and increasing child allowances. But Ms. Comolli found that in towns and cities where the party was gaining popularity, birthrates actually fell. Highly educated women, whom the researchers described as most likely to feel alienated by their neighbors’ support for the radical right, were especially likely to forgo having a child.
The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis of the era of nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same goes for natural disasters, political upheaval and war: In a global world, no one is insulated. “It’s not just your own uncertainty, but it’s that you get all the uncertainty around you as well,” said Trude Lappegård, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. “It’s difficult to disentangle what concerns you and what possibly can concern you, and what’s concerning other people.”
Or as Axel Peter Kristensen, who did his graduate research with Ms. Lappegård, put it when we spoke last summer, “Which uncertainty matters? Is it the one that’s very close to you? Is it the one that is on a larger abstract scale? Is it one that’s here in Europe? Or is it in Norway?”
Mr. Kristensen himself has a partner and a job and owns a small apartment in Oslo, but at 33, he is not yet a parent. He contrasted his life course with that of his parents, who had all three of their children by their early 30s. At the time, Mr. Kristensen’s mother was training to be a nurse, and his father was a carpenter. From today’s vantage point, theirs was not “a secure situation — renting, not having that much money,” he said. “But they still felt that, of course, we’re going to have children.” Mr. Kristensen’s mother intended to pursue education, and his parents wanted to eventually buy a home, but in that era, kids were not viewed as obstacles to achieving those goals. “They were not postponing birth. They were just doing it at the same time.”
He talks with his mother about these generational patterns. “The biggest difference, watching her narrative and my narrative, my feeling is that these things should be in order first,” he said. Seen through a lens of uncertainty, the global pattern of delayed marriage and childbearing may signify something more than just a matter of “shifting priorities.” It may represent a desperate attempt to create some sort of stable foundation in what one economist recently described as “a singularly turbulent” era.
“Having a nice income, having steady employment, a nice education, having an apartment,” Mr. Kristensen said. “These new milestones, has the importance of them changed in an era or time where economic uncertainty is being felt much more close to the skin?” Their greater significance, though, comes at a time when they have become much harder to attain. In the United States, the median age of a first-time home buyer just hit 40. “One possible way of coping with this would be to postpone having children,” he said, “or would be to maybe drop it.”
Even proponents of the uncertainty theory acknowledge that there are plenty of other factors that contribute to the world’s declining birthrates. There has been a marked decline in marriage. Increased social isolation, to say nothing of what some have called a “sex recession,” certainly does not augur a baby boom. Nor do today’s employment prospects. Educated workers face what the economist Claudia Goldin has called “greedy jobs,” positions that demand far more of an employee than can be contained between the hours of 9 and 5, while less-skilled workers cope with unpredictable shifts and wages that have barely kept pace with the cost of living. It’s hard to square either with the expectation that parents will invest huge amounts of time and money in their children’s development. Education campaigns and access to long-acting contraception effectively reduced teen pregnancy, a change that has been a significant driver of the overall drop in births in the United States.
Look hard enough, though, and many of those factors become forms of uncertainty too. Ms. Comolli told me that she and her partner have postponed parenthood until their job situations feel more settled. She often thinks about how her worries over her advancing age and the possible health consequences compare with material factors that are the primary concern of so many other people, such as mortgage rates or rising prices: “Both in my personal and professional life, I often wonder whether these are fundamentally different types of uncertainty — something that should perhaps be defined and named differently — or whether they are simply two sides of the same coin,” she said. In any case, whether the uncertainty is psychological or structural, “the key challenge is to better understand how these dimensions interact.”
Like nearly every other scholar I spoke to, Ms. Comolli emphasized the need to clarify the concept of uncertainty and refine ways of measuring it. Perhaps the simplest way is just to ask people how they’re feeling about the future. Demographers are doing this via the Generations and Gender Survey, which queries 10,000 respondents per country in over two dozen countries every three years. A new set of questions asks how worried people are about things like climate change, high unemployment and military conflicts in the future.
Daniel Schneider, the Harvard sociologist, sees the connection between uncertainty and fertility as a middle ground between the two sides of what he called “the family wars” — those endless cultural debates in which the right pushes old-fashioned family structures with tradwife moms home-schooling 10 kids, and the left argues that the era of the nuclear family is over and “everyone’s just going to live with their cats,” he joked. The uncertainty research suggests that, in fact, “People do want to have families, but encounter this really uncertain and unstable world that also demands these really intense standards of parents,” Schneider said.
Solving the problem with one-off pronatalist gestures such as a tax break for having children has proved futile time and time again. To truly make a change, policymakers must take a “holistic approach to making lives and systems that are more conducive to having and raising children, and more conducive to living a happy and secure and healthy life as a person,” said Sarah Hayford, who directs the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. “You can’t address the parenting part without addressing the secure life part.” That takes structural change.
Or very deep pockets. In South Korea, home to one of the world’s lowest fertility rates — 0.8 lifetime births per woman — the construction company Booyoung Group made headlines in 2024 when it offered 100 million Korean won (around $68,000 today, or roughly twice South Korea’s annual per capita income) to any of its employees who had a baby. Last year, the company reported 36 births — an increase of about 60 percent compared with the average before the program was launched. The bonus is on top of ongoing support for medical expenses and eventual college tuition. Employees who have a third child can potentially choose between the 100-million-won payment and guaranteed, permanent housing support. “The company resolved the financial concerns that were my biggest worry in having a second child,” one employee told a Korean newspaper, which calculated that if the company were a nation, its birthrate would be 3.6 times as high as South Korea’s.
In the United States, twice the annual per capita income amounts to about $153,000. Is that the scale of intervention it would take to change people’s minds? Most policy proposals aimed at families barely nibble around the edges. The Heritage Foundation has called for the government to issue a $2,000-per-child “home child care equalization credit” to subsidize a married parent who stays home with a kid, an amount less than one-third of what the average American household spends in a single month. These nickels and dimes will never be able to counter the sweeping sense of uncertainty that governs so many young people’s lives.
There is, however, one low-cost fertility policy that actually seems to work: faith, perhaps the original uncertainty reduction strategy.
Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for their higher-than-average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and supports family life.
But while certain denominations such as Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism are seeing an increase in converts, overall, more Americans are identifying as “nones,” or having no particular religion. Of particular relevance is the rate at which women are fleeing the fold. The Heritage Foundation’s January report on the future of the American family refers to religion dozens of times and paid family leave just a couple of times, even though a bipartisan majority of Americans have said the policy is important to them.
Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.
She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?”
When I spoke to Ms. Rivera again in early April, she had some happy updates. A number of her close friends had become pregnant, a development that sparked in her a newfound sense of agency. “My very best friend is due in July, and that was a pretty instant feeling.” She said she found herself lying awake at night thinking, “I can’t give up. There’s no choice. I need to support her, and I need to keep working to improve the world.”
Then while poking around online, she and her husband stumbled onto a beautiful home in Minneapolis not far from her parents and grandmother, and decided to go for it. Mere days after their offer was accepted, Department of Homeland Security forces descended on their fair city of Minneapolis. Watching members of their community rally to protect one another further bolstered her sense of agency. “I really think witnessing the bravery of the people, in the place that is becoming our home again, kind of shifted something for us,” she said. Perhaps this was a world in which they could have a child after all.
Their change of heart hasn’t completely banished the fears she described last summer. “I know that it’s going to be really scary,” she said. But the moment she and her husband allowed themselves to imagine becoming parents, “extreme baby fever” overcame them both, “in a way that feels actually crazy — primally, really, really emotionally intense,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have a choice but to give it a shot.”
This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Anna Louie Sussman, a contributing Opinion writer, writes about gender, economics and reproduction and is the author of the forthcoming book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.”
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