Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All
By Anna Louie Sussman
... 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. Members of 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...
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 Professor Vignoli’s analysis, increasing exposure to a volatile global economy and accelerating technological change make it hard for young people to project a path forward with even a modest degree of confidence...
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 a.m. and 5 p.m., 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...Look hard enough, though, and many of those factors become forms of uncertainty too....
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-parents-demographics-future.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lFA.dvDj.9jMGEPpxjB8W&smid=url-share
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Yet I believe that children can be miraculous under any conditions; that we have to see them that way.
Bernini's Life is Beautiful shows one way we can be with children, whether or not they're our own.
