The U.S. birthrate is declining. Rose Paz’s choices help explain why.
Ms. Paz, 22, grew up in Salt Lake City, the eldest of three children, born when her mother, an immigrant from Mexico, was 16. Her parents, a waitress and a cook, worked a lot, leaving her responsible for her younger siblings. She remembers having to skip sleepovers and birthday parties to care for them.
Ms. Paz is studying for a bachelor’s degree in marketing. She has a serious boyfriend, but does not want to have children now.
“I want to be financially stable and in a place I can call my own,” she said. “I saw my parents get stressed over money, and I don’t want my kid to experience that.”
Not so long ago, women like Ms. Paz — in their early 20s, from backgrounds that are far from privileged — would have been among the most likely to be having children.
Now this group is a key contributor to the country’s declining birthrate, which is at an all-time low, down by over 25 percent since 2007, the year the fall began.
The decline has prompted hand-wringing among portions of the political class, with some conservatives calling it the triumph of selfishness over sacrifice. A report last month by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” warned that “when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself.”
But academics say there is another way to look at it.
“There’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the birthrate, but the decline is also a success story,” said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A large part of the drop comes from teenagers and women in their early 20s — the least likely to want, or be able to provide for a baby.
Drops among Hispanic, white and Black teenagers accounted for 37 percent of the national birthrate decline between 2007, when the rate started to go down, and 2019, according to calculations by Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, and her colleagues.
White women ages 20 to 24 without a bachelor’s degree were another big contributor, they found. Together, the two groups added up to more than half of the overall drop.
The statistics help debunk the perception that the birthrate decline is being driven exclusively by highly educated women from privileged backgrounds. The birthrate is dropping among college graduates, too, but they make up a smaller portion of the phenomenon.
Martha Bailey, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that, among college-educated women, ages 20 to 24, the birthrate dropped by 20 percent between 2007 and 2024.
But for women with only a high school diploma, the rate dropped by a full 50 percent.
Thirty years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.
Now, the teenage birthrate is down by 70 percent since 2007. And the unmarried birthrate is down by 30 percent.
Roger Severino, vice president for economic and domestic policy at Heritage, welcomed the decline in unmarried teen births. He said he was not pushing for “more births at all costs,” but instead wanted to make it easier for Americans to get married and have children earlier. The alternative, he said, would mean an eventual “demographic collapse and societal breakdown.”
“Marriage and family should not be considered a luxury good,” he said.
But some social scientists say the declines show that the most vulnerable young women are taking control over their lives.
“We spent decades shaming women for having kids under the wrong circumstances, for not having their ducks in a row,” said Ms. Guzzo, the demographer. “Now they are holding up their end of the bargain.”
Adulthood, Redefined
If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.
Policymakers are looking for fixes, but the dynamics driving the lower birthrate are complicated.
Researchers have pointed to several possible explanations. The decline coincided with the introduction of the smartphone, which rapidly became a tool for both social connection and isolation, even a substitute for sex, said Kasey Buckles, an economist at Notre Dame.
At the same time, the use of more reliable contraception, such as implants and I.U.D.’s., has gone up.
Researchers said that the transition to adulthood has also changed: Young people are less likely to get married first and find their way to stability together. The median age of first marriage has risen to 30 for men and 29 for women, about three years older for both sexes than in 2007.
In interviews, many women talked about establishing themselves, getting a degree or a stable job, before settling down with a partner. They often talked about watching their mothers struggle under the weight of responsibility.
Whatever the reasons, more young women are making it to their mid-to-late 20s without children. For the first time, almost half of the country’s 30-year-old women are childless. In 1976, it was just 18 percent.
Hope Bechaver is one of those women. She has a deep ambivalence about having children.
She wants control over her life after a chaotic childhood. When she was 13, she had to care for her younger brothers, 2 and 4, while her father, a corrections officer, worked.
“Sometimes I picture having a kid, and I think of that overload — two kids, both in diapers,” she said.
Now 30, she is happily married and living in Denver. She works at a gym and said she is “selfish with her time,” hiking on weekends with her husband, Brandon, a weapons specialist in the Air Force. She enjoys spending time with her niece, but has no urge to have a child of her own.
“Brandon and I,” she said, “we like our peace.”
New Expectations
In interviews, many women said they wanted children, but also a certain kind of life.
Kailey Clay is 21, about the age when her mother started having children. But Ms. Clay, who said she is not in a relationship, has focused on her career since graduating in December from the University of Utah.
Her drive comes in part from childhood. When Ms. Clay was 9, her father, who did not finish college, stopped working for health reasons. Her mother, who stocked shelves at Walmart, became the sole breadwinner for a family of six. Ms. Clay remembers living with a broken tooth for weeks, until her parents could afford to fix it.
“I don’t think I would have kids anytime soon,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to put a child into this world and then not be able to support them in the way that I felt I should.”
Even as they strive for financial independence, many said they also hoped to get married. Most said two incomes were needed for a stable middle-class life.
But there was also wariness about relationships. Saje Fedrick, 28, who works in the kitchen at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant in northeastern Pennsylvania, said all of her friends have jobs, but few have children. The reason, she said, “has a lot to do with the men.”
She said they watched their mothers or aunts struggle without financial independence.
“We really started to see how men treated women — like, ‘I’m a provider, so I can do this,’” she said. “‘I have control over you.’”
Now, women have their own money, she said, and “men are shaking in their boots.”
She is pointing to a new demographic reality. Women in their early 20s are now almost as likely to be employed as men. In 2006, young men were 10 percentage points more likely to be working than women.
Ms. Fedrick said that on dates, many men seemed threatened by her financial independence. That has prompted some soul-searching.
“If you want to meet someone, you have to get out there, go to dinners, go to the bar,” she said. “Then I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want to do any of that. I’m tired of trying.’”
Needing a Nest
Economists have been skeptical that finances are behind the birthrate decline, reasoning that household income is not lower than it was in 2007.
But the typical age at which young Americans are buying their first home has gone way up, to 40 last year, from 31 in 2007, according to the National Association of Realtors.
And for some families, renting is proving difficult too.
ReAnn Bell, 33, a retail worker, lives with her 9-year-old daughter at her mother’s house in eastern Pennsylvania. All along, she has wanted more children, and for years had searched for a partner.
Two years ago, she found one. He is a chef, and they want to have a child together.
But he, too, has a school-age child, and they cannot afford to rent a place that is big enough.
“I’m not big on career things,” she said. “But I’m excited about being a mother and a wife and having the nuclear family.”
Children, Eventually
The overwhelming majority of American women still want children, according to national surveys. And their ideal number, on average, is two. The question is whether they will reach that goal as they age.
Recent generations have. Ms. Bailey, the U.C.L.A. economist, compared two sets of women at the end of their childbearing years: the eldest millennials, born in 1984, and the youngest boomers, born in 1964.
What she found was surprising. There has been virtually no drop in the number of children born to women by the time they turn 44.
In other words, those who delayed having children in their early 20s ended up having nearly as many kids as women before them. They just got there a few years later.
That tracks with other statistics. Women in their early 30s now have the highest birthrate of any group. And, in a significant reversal, a woman in her early 40s is now more likely to give birth than a teenager.
That does not mean that Gen Z women, ages 14 to 29, will keep up the trend.
Jakeisha Ezuma, 31, a dental assistant in Arvada, Colo., shows how these decisions can be unpredictable. Married for six years, she delayed having children, because she wanted to “make something for myself and my future children,” after growing up in poverty in Indiana.
In her 20s, she got dental training. But after a rejection from a competitive hygienist program, she and her husband, a manager at Safeway, decided to start trying. She had a baby in November.
They both received paid parental leave under Colorado’s family leave law, and she found a state-sponsored program with free diapers and wipes.
“We are comfortable and happy,” she said. “I want people to know it’s not so hard. The kids, they don’t care about the money. They only want your time and love.”
Sabrina Tavernise is a writer-at-large for The Times, focused on political life in America and how Americans see the changes in Washington.
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