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Impromptu: The real reason Americans are having fewer kids
00:30:23
Many economists and politicians are alarmed that Americans, like others around the world, are having fewer kids. But, apart from wanting a growing labor force, is this really a problem? An episode from The Post’s Opinions podcast, “Impromptu.”
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- [00:03]
Martine
Hey, it's Martine. I hope you're having a great Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends. We're taking a couple days off for the holiday. In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode of another podcast we make here at the Post. It's called Impromptu, and it comes from my colleagues on the opinion side. Each week you can hear Post columnists having candid conversations about the things that they can't stop thinking about. A lot of the time, they're the things that I also cannot stop thinking about. Earlier this fall, the podcast tackled why Americans are having fewer kids. This was a conversation between columnists Shadi Hamid, Monica Hessey, and Heather Long, and they talked about whether this great American baby bust is actually a problem at all. It's a very thought provoking conversation and I wanted to share it with you today. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Impromptu wherever you're listening to this, and have a great holiday weekend. We'll be back on Monday with more stories from the Washington Post.
- [01:06]
Shadi Hamid
Yeah. So, Heather and Monica, I'd be curious what your thoughts are on this. Did you always want kids?
- [01:13]
Monica Hesse
Go for it, Heather.
- [01:15]
Heather Long
Ah, you beat me to it. I did always want kids. I do think my thoughts. Thinking evolved a lot, as many millennials have. I remember graduating high school around age 18 and thinking, wow, I'll probably have two or three kids by the time I'm 28. And instead, by the time I was 38, I had no kids. And anyway, I ended up getting divorced in my late 30s and had to make a decision, how much do I really want kids? So I actually became what's known as a single mom by choice.
- [01:47]
Monica Hesse
I didn't want them for a really long time. I knew the statistics of how hard it was for women to have careers and had families. And I knew what happened to people, especially women, when they left the workforce and then tried to claw their way back in. So I waited until a lot later in life when I felt like my work was in a good place and other parts of my life were in a good place. And that brings its own complications. So I think that there's. There's never a great time to do it. Or maybe an optimist would say, there's never a bad time to do it.
- [02:26]
Shadi Hamid
This is impromptu with Washington Post Opinions, a show where we bring you conversations about the issues we can't stop thinking about. I'm Shadi Hamid, a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Post, and this week we're talking about having kids and why many Americans are having them less. The fertility rate has been falling over the last decade and hit a historic low last year, causing alarm from politicians and economists alike. But what's underneath this cultural shift? And is it really a problem? I'm joined by two of my colleagues to unpack all of this.
- [03:00]
Heather Long
I'm Heather Long, a columnist at the Washington Post. I focus on the economy, particularly the middle class economy.
- [03:06]
Monica Hesse
I'm Monica Hesse and I'm also a columnist. I write about gender and its impact on society for the Style section.
- [03:13]
Shadi Hamid
So. So Americans are having fewer kids. We've been below what's called the replacement rate, basically 2.1 children per woman since 2007, and the numbers keep dropping. Before we get into whether we think that's a problem, I want to ask both of you why you think this is happening. Why aren't Americans having as many children as they used to?
- [03:35]
Monica Hesse
I think that that is a fascinating question in part because whomever you ask is going to provide you with a different answer. The conservative answer to that question is often that American appreciate the same kinds of family values that we once did, that the world doesn't appreciate the same kinds of family values that we once did. Progressives might be more apt to look at policies and say that we just simply don't have family friendly policies. And our lack of maternal medicine care, our lack of supported childcare, our lack of family parental leave, all of those contribute to a decreased interest in having kids. And the more complicated and nuanced answer is that even countries that seem to have quote unquote family values or that seem to have really strong social networks still see declining birth rates. Which gets at the fact that there might be more complicated questions related to what women want from their lives, what married couples want from their lives, what couples want from their lives in general, and how children fit into that.
- [04:41]
Heather Long
I'd jump on what Monica just said and say that I see two overarching changes and shifts. Number one is what I'd call stability. It's interesting, Shadi, you pointed out the last time the United States had the replacement rate of two children was 2007. That's right before the great financial crisis really rocks the world. And what we've seen in the years since then is a lot of young people are really struggling to launch, in a traditional way, the old, okay, you're going to find somebody and get married, then you're going to buy a house, then you're going to get a dog, then you're going to have a child. The reality is we have a Third of young people in this country are still living with their parents right now. You know, it's a little bit hard to think about, I'm going to go have a baby when you're living in your parents basement. And so we've just seen that those economic concerns really add up and become a lot more tangible for many people. So they can't find the right partner and they can't find that economic stability that usually used to come before having kids. I think the second one is really that I hear a lot what Monica was pointing to, and that is this question of, is my life really going to be more fulfilled and better with kids? And that's much more of this deeper values question. And I'll just share. A good childless by choice friend of mine made a really interesting comment to me just this weekend. She said, you know, 15 years ago when I would tell somebody I don't have kids by choice, they would often respond, I'm sorry. Like, I'm so sorry you're missing out on this great part of life today. When she says, I don't have kids and I'm not planning to, people often respond, you're so smart, you're lucky. I wish I had done it like you had. There's been just this huge generational shift about the perceptions of what makes a fulfilled life today. And coming from the economic and finance world, like the biggest aspiration in economic world is to be a dink, a double income, no kids, because that's how you really maximize your ability to travel the world, to have a great house and not have those daily responsibilities and costs.
- [06:50]
Shadi Hamid
Okay, so a couple things I want to unpack there. First is the economic part of this, because, Heather, as you said, millennials had been struggling quite a bit. But in recent years, there is a stabilization that's happening, especially among older millennials. And as Monica said, in countries where you have incredibly generous family friendly policies and social welfare and the protection of the state, we still see plummeting fertility rates, as in Norway, Sweden and Finland and many other places. So clearly it can't be just brute material factors that there's something else going on here about how people perceive their opportunity cost, that maybe they're prioritizing being more wealthy over having a traditional family because they simply think that certain things will make them happier and other things will make them less happy. And they're making calculations about how they're going to feel later in their lives. Can you maybe say a little bit more about how values interact with economics?
- [08:03]
Heather Long
I'll be interested What Monica says on this, you know, from my perspective as someone who does economic data every day, I would say what I see is delayed fertility and sort of delayed signs of adulthood. So, for instance, for long time, we thought millennials just were never going to buy homes. And Shadi, as you point out, there's been this huge surge in the last several years of millennials buying homes. So they just did it at a much later rate. And I think that's why you're seeing in the data that there's the one group of people of women who are actually having more children is the 40 plus cohort, or sometimes it's looked at as sort of the 37 + cohort. And unfortunately, that doesn't always work out. I certainly, I'm sure everybody else listening to this know some people who tried really hard to have and, you know, for whatever reason, we're not able to, and partly it's waiting for a long time to do that.
- [08:54]
Monica Hesse
I also think that there might be some economic equalization that economically, millennials might have caught up. But there are other ways that life is structured now that are different than in previous generations. I think of J.D. vance casually saying last week that if you were struggling to pay for childcare, maybe it's time for Grandma and grandpa to step up. Which ignores the fact that for many, many Americans, Grandma and Grandpa live 1,000 miles away and are still working themselves. And ignores the fact that paying for childcare isn't optional. It's a necessity for many couples. So I think that you could say, they're buying houses. Why don't they have kids? But there's also the concept of is the social network what it once was? Do we have the support systems that we need in ways that can't be measured in dollars and, but are instead measured in intangible ways that still make it easier to have a child or have family.
- [09:57]
Shadi Hamid
So before we move on, I want to share some statistics on this that I found really striking and surprising. According to the Pew Research Center, 26% of Americans say having children is extremely or very important for living a fulfilling Life, compared to 71% who say that about having a job or career they enjoy. So this really dovetails with what you were saying, Monica, about just really profound shifts in how people think about what makes them happy. But there's also here, I think, a marriage crisis. And here the numbers are also quite surprising. 25% of 40 year olds have never been married. Just let that sit for a second. In 1980, that number was 6%. So just in a few decades, we've seen a remarkable shift in the unmarried population. And these changes are also correlated with a historic drop in the number of Americans who identify as religious. And I don't think that's surprising either. Something has really changed in our society in the way we think about our values. Do we prioritize freedom and maximizing our freedom when it comes to traveling or living in different places or being able to buy a home or buy more homes, or just having that flexibility versus the very obvious constraints that come with having kids? And I think even the way we think about freedom and constraint is illustrative here. When we hear the word constraint, we think, oh, that's negative to be constrained. But someone else might say that having children constrains you in a positive way because it grounds you to a reality outside of yourself. Do you agree with that characterization? Should we actually be thinking about ways to constrain ourselves more actively and embracing the idea of constraint?
- [12:06]
Monica Hesse
I think, and I'm not trying to sidestep your question, but I'm gonna push back on the premise a little bit just because I think that it is very tempting to statistics like the one you just cited about the number of married people now versus 25 years ago, or the number of people with kids now versus 25 years ago. And when we talk about whether people were happier then or more selfless then or more likely to stay married then or more likely to have kids then, I think it's also helpful to think about other factoids, like the fact that it wasn't until 1974 that a woman could open her own bank account and have her own credit card. So I think when we look at a lot of instances, like families used to stay together, it's not always that it was out of happiness. It might have been out of necessity. It might have been because it was harder for a woman to be a single woman, and she was financially dependent on her husband and sort of would be looked at askance morally if she didn't have one. So I think that in some ways the question is not about whether we are more selfish or less virtuous, but a different kind of shift in the fact that women in particular have more kinds of choices and more pathways than they might have had 30 or 40 years ago. And I think that your question of constraint versus freedom is a really interesting one. But it's not only the act of having children that might have constrained women or couples 40 years ago. It would have been the act of marriage was kind of a lopsided deal for a long time. And now people are thinking more about what they want to be a part of.
- [13:50]
Heather Long
I do think it's fair to point out that the divorce rate was also higher in the 80s. You know, it's not like all of these marriages were perfect and providing a lot of fulfillment. I will say a number of people call me. You know, as I said, I'm a single mom by choice. And almost every week I hear from a woman who would like to have a child. But they will often say to me, I don't want to do it like you did. I don't want to do it alone. I would only want to have do it with a partner, because it is. It's a very difficult road to walk to be a single parent in this country. And so, Shadi, I think you're right. There's partly a partnering crisis. Maybe it's a dating app crisis if we really want to be there. But I'd be curious, Shadi, to hear your thoughts, because you seem to sort of fit in that bucket of somebody who would like to have a child, but the circumstances aren't quite there for you yet.
- [14:40]
Shadi Hamid
Yeah, for me, I would really like to have kids. I. I do want to get married sooner rather than later. As I've been getting older, I have been reflecting more on these deeper questions of did I prioritize the right things? And maybe having regrets that I didn't prioritize getting married and having a family earlier. And then you start to feel like, oh, you know, have I waited too long? What does that mean? And then how that implicates, like, other parts of your life. So I think that for me, this is an intensely personal question. And in going through the data and looking at this debate more closely, I'm almost, in a sense, talking to myself and trying to work out my own conflicted feelings about the choices that I made. And I know that I'm not alone. A lot of my friends here in Washington, D.C. whether it's mid-30s to early 40s, are really contending with some of these same questions. And it is really, I think, an ultimate question of what does it mean to live a good life? And those are hard questions to answer. But, Heather, you know, now that we're talking about the personal, you mentioned that you are a single parent by choice. Could you say a little bit more about what that means just in terms of one's everyday life and how you made that decision?
- [16:14]
Heather Long
Yeah, it's definitely a really difficult decision to make. But I think, like a lot of people that you're pointing to Shadi. You sort of think you're gonna find the right partner at some point, that it'll just happen and maybe you didn't prioritize it enough or maybe it was just not your time. And so for me, you know, I got to sort of that late 30s and sort of felt like it was now or never and did a lot of thinking. And I really felt that for me, I would not feel like I had a fulfilled life if I didn't at least try to become a parent. Whereas while I felt it would be nice to find a relationship again, that I could probably be okay if I never did. And so I looked a lot into adoption and into having a child on my own through IVF and using a sperm donor. And I ultimately did have a daughter on my own. And I have it. She's two now and wonderful. But life does totally change. And Monica hinted at this earlier that I think women are very cognizant whether they're partnered or single parents like me, that it's really hard on your career. It's really hard to balance, particularly having a young child that just needs so much hands on attention in those early months and years, I think.
- [17:35]
Monica Hesse
And not to turn this into a therapy session or an advice column, but I think that when you're struggling figuring out who, whether to move forward with it, the difficult thing is that the economics of it never makes sense. Having a child is almost never a logical choice. If you're making a pro and con list. On the con list is like, it's expensive, it's exhausting. You'll lose your free time. You might lose your sense of self, you might lose your connection with your partner if you have one. Your friendships might dwindle. The kid will, you know, scream at you, yell at you, all of those things. And on the pro side is really like, there's a really beautiful color that you've never seen before. And I can't describe it to you. And the only way you can see it is if you open this door and you just have to trust that this really pretty color is going to outweigh all of the bad things. And what's difficult is that many of us can conceptualize what does it feel like to have a lack of sleep, what does it feel like to have a lack of money? What does it feel like to not have enough time. We can conceptualize all of the downsides that come with parenthood. It's really hard to conceptualize the positive sides unless you go there. And so making the decision to go there I just think is really hard and it's not easy and it's not always the right decision either.
- [19:08]
Shadi Hamid
Yeah, that's a really good point. That it requires a kind of leap of faith. And no matter how many books you read or podcasts you listen to about what it's like to have kids, never going to be enough to really understand. And so here I am as the, the one of three of us who doesn't have kids and I can only, I'm trying, you know, I've, I try to imagine, but obviously I'll only ever be able to get so far. So we've been talking about how we've gotten here, but I want to also get more into why it matters and what we can do about it. First, let's take a quick break.
- [19:47]
Monica Hesse
Foreign.
- [20:03]
Shadi Hamid
Welcome back. I'm Shadi Hamid and this is impromptu. So we often see the framing of this drop in children per family as a quote unquote fertility crisis or a birth rate bomb. Do you see it as a crisis? Is a population decrease really something we should care about and even maybe freak out about?
- [20:25]
Heather Long
On a scale of 1 to 10, from the United States perspective, I'd probably put it at a five. I really don't think it's like a hair on fire type of crisis. And I'd say that US is kind of in a unique perspective. One immigration. People still want to move here and you can make up for a lot of your fertility problems by IMM from other parts of the world. Obviously we don't have a great immigration policy. That's a separate podcast. But the second one I think is more interesting and that's the artificial intelligence revolution. We're obviously at the early stages of that, but everything points to we need less and labor intensive future. Right. You go to McDonald's today and most of the time you're ordering on a screen. You just don't need as many humans to do what we used to need them to do even five years ago. So I think the economy can evolve, evolve and adjust to a low fertility rate future. The one thing that is problematic is the government finance side. You know, how do we finance Social Security and Medicare in this country in a world where there's just fewer and fewer taxpayers paying in and working? I think a lot of that's going to need a big rethink. But I think in the United States we're very lucky that we could potentially have a longer transition than certainly Japan and South Korea and other nations because of our immigration and because we're pretty innovative on the AI front.
- [21:46]
Shadi Hamid
Okay. And Monica, I know that you're a little bit more skeptical of the economic argument for having more children. Do you want to maybe unpack that skepticism?
- [21:58]
Monica Hesse
Well, I think that a declining fertility rate is an economic problem, so long as we're viewing the economy basically as a Ponzi scheme where it just requires more and more and more young people to pay for older people to pay for Social Security to pay for Medicare. And it's not that the revenue stream isn't real. It is real and it is necessary. But it seems like the solution shouldn't be encouraging people who don't want to have kids to instead have kids as part of their economic duty. I think that certainly we should be encouraging pro family policies to make it easier for people who do want to have children to have children. But I think that there are untapped things that we could look at or more strongly consider.
- [22:51]
Heather Long
I don't think the reality. I think we're all saying the reality is it's a low fertility future. And you can do a little bit around the edges to change that, either through immigration policy or, you know, there's some really creative policies that are going on in some other countries, like Denmark, that they're actually subsidizing ivf. You know, obviously we do see a lot of people, you know, delaying, trying to have kids. And so I think that's actually a really interesting discussion that's going on and we'll see if that changes the ball game at all in certain countries.
- [23:22]
Shadi Hamid
Okay. So we've covered a lot of ground here. The question of culture and values, the question of how much of this is about economics and how much of this really comes down to really personal decisions that governments are going to have only limited influence over. So I'm curious what your overall takeaways are.
- [23:43]
Monica Hesse
I think that it benefits societies to have family friendly policies. I think that it benefits society to have happy mothers, happy fathers, happy children. And I think that some of those policies should include generous familial leave, should include government assisted childcare, universal preschool, extended maternal health care. I think that we should do all of those things because it's the right thing to do and it's the sign of a healthy and caring society. I also think that we should acknowledge that there are countries that have tried many of those things, like South Korea, like Hungary, like Russia. And those countries haven't necessarily seen an uptick. And so then I think that we start asking the next question, which is what happens if we accept That a declining birth rate is the new normal for the foreseeable future. And instead of the solution being let's get women to have more babies, we start to think about how to shape a world that has a declining birth rate, how to shape a world that is smaller, that grows less. What does growth mean? What does success mean? What does a healthy society look like if it doesn't depend on increasingly more people?
- [25:00]
Heather Long
Yeah, that was well said, Monica. I just added, one of the takeaways of this conversation seems to be we need better dating apps or better ways to find partners or matchmakers. There you go. Bring back the matchmakers. I'm excited to see in the debate that we're having right now for president that both parties are talking about expanding the child tax credit. You know, talking about expanding maybe IVF subsidies or funding even. And these are positive conversations. I wish they'd go even further and talk more about childcare policies as well. And, you know, I think the last thing that we haven't really touched on a lot. I wish there'd be a Hollywood shift, too. Like when we were growing up, you know, a lot of us remember the Cosby show or Full House, you know, there were just so family matters. There were all these sitcoms about families. And sure, you laughed, but there were images that were positive of families and family life. And it strikes me if you even just look at who won the Emmy Awards in the last couple of days, it's all shows that are fantasy or workplace dramas or teen dramas. It's Shogun. I mean, great show, but it's not really families or Law and Order, NCIS or Emily in Paris. And I just wish that. It's weird that we had this void where we can't, as a society, visualize a happy and fulfilled life for all different types of people. It's fine to have Samantha and Sex in the City, but where's the person who's a happy mom? And as a single mom who has a really tough life, people constantly say, you look so happy. And I say, I'm the happiest I've been in years, even though life is really hard. And I wish we could visualize some more positive images of parenthood.
- [26:44]
Shadi Hamid
Amen to that. Yeah. More family sitcoms. I hadn't thought of that before, but I can get behind that. Okay with that. I want to thank both of you for being a part of this week's episode of Impromptu.
- [26:55]
Monica Hesse
Thanks for having me. Anytime.
- [26:57]
Heather Long
Thank you.
- [27:01]
Shadi Hamid
We've got one more thing. Before you go. Here's a quick word. From our humor columnist Alexandra Petri.
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Alexandra Petri
I know why nobody's having children anymore, and it's because once you have them, you cannot take them anywhere, becoming the main character of that space. Having a child is like becoming a vampire, but in reverse. The only way you can see people is if you invite them into your home, and you aren't allowed to go out at night anymore. Also, you age rapidly and go to sleep the second the sun sets. I understand that babysitters exist, but this requires scheduling them in advance, a skill I lacked before. And having offspring has not miraculously made me better at We've discussed taking children on planes. Well, try a restaurant. Taking a child to a restaurant combines all the fun of eating in a restaurant with all the fun of deadlifting 25 struggling pounds of toddler and going on a walk around the block until the food arrives. Have you tried putting someone into a high chair who does not want to be in a high chair? It's like threading a needle, but the thread is mad at you. It's like getting a camel through the eye of a needle. You think gravity will be my ally in this, but somehow gravity stops operating when your child decides that the high chair is not a destination she's interested in visiting. You hold the child and she just hovers in midair, screaming, apparently weightless, like bathing a cat. But the cat will eventually be able to retell this incident to people in a way that makes you the villain. What every restaurant should have is a ball pit, but instead, almost no restaurants have this. What they have instead, sometimes, is coloring equipment, which is fun for somewhere between 0 minutes and the entire duration of your meal, and it's impossible to know which in advance. If restaurants knew what was good for them, they would all be at the park. The park has a gated enclosure into which you can release your child. Goodbye, child, you say, and the child goes off and disappears into a large outdoor litter box for cats. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of them propelling themselves down an inclined plastic surface or swinging on a swing, and then, after half an hour has elapsed, you can retrieve your child, and your child will say something cryptic like that squirrel is a dead head, and it will turn out that she's been poking at a squirrel carcass for the last 10 minutes. Minutes. And that's how things should be. Every restaurant should have an area full of slightly grimy sand where your child can go and roll around while you sit on a bench nearby, saying yeah at intervals and catch up on your email. They should also have this at movie theaters and the club. So I can go to the club? No, who am I kidding? I did not even go to the club when I stayed up after 10pm But I'd like to think that in theory, I could go there anytime. I read that in Scandinavia you can just park your stroller outside the bar and your baby sleeps cozily while you go in and have pint. They should have the highest fertility rate in the world.
- [29:51]
Shadi Hamid
This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and edited by Demir Maruschik, Chris Solentrop and Alison Michaels. And Chris Rukan designed our art. Special thanks to Millie Mitra and Deirdre Byrne. As always, let us know what you thought of the conversation and what you think we should talk about next. Email us@impromptuashpost.com and if you're liking what you're hearing, please rate us or leave a review.