We Keep Asking Why People Aren’t Having Children

Perhaps the better question is what kind of society makes parenthood feel possible.

There is something strange about the way we talk about falling birth rates.

We look at the number first.

Canada’s fertility rate fell to 1.25 children per woman in 2024, the lowest ever recorded. The average age of a mother at childbirth reached 31.8, five years older than it was in the mid-1970s. Similar declines are occurring across much of Europe and East Asia.

Then comes the familiar question:

Why aren't people having children?

Housing is too expensive. Childcare is difficult. Careers are demanding. People marry later. Some don't want children. Others are worried about climate change, war or the economy.

All of those explanations contain some truth.

But lately I have wondered whether the question itself is too simple.

Perhaps we aren't watching millions of people independently make the same decision not to reproduce.

Perhaps we have built a society in which becoming a parent increasingly requires several unlikely things to go right at the same time.

A stable relationship.

A place to live.

Enough money.

A sufficiently secure job.

Childcare.

Time.

Health.

Some confidence that next year will resemble this one.

And, increasingly, the feeling that you are emotionally, financially and psychologically ready to raise a child properly.

Any one of those is manageable.

The difficulty is getting all of them to line up.

The fertility problem may partly be a timing problem

Imagine someone at 27.

She would like children someday.

But her career is just beginning. Her apartment is too small. Her relationship is new. Houses feel impossibly expensive. So she waits.

At 30, the job is better, but the relationship has ended.

At 32, she meets someone.

At 34, they are finally financially comfortable enough to begin thinking seriously about children.

Nothing dramatic happened.

There was no moment when she rejected motherhood. No ideological conversion. No decision that children were undesirable.

Life simply kept saying:

Not quite yet.

That distinction matters.

The United Nations Population Fund tried something unusually sensible in 2025: instead of looking only at fertility statistics, it asked people what families they actually wanted.

Its survey covered about 14,000 people in 14 countries representing more than a third of the world's population. Roughly one in five expected not to have the number of children they wanted. Among people who had or wanted children, financial limitations were the most commonly reported obstacle, followed by unemployment or job insecurity. Housing, childcare, health, uncertainty about the future and difficulty finding a suitable partner also appeared.

That suggests something important.

Low fertility is partly about preference.

But it is also about friction between preference and reality.

And the friction accumulates.

We have quietly raised the entrance requirements for parenthood

There was a time when parenthood was treated almost as a stage of adulthood.

You grew up. You found someone. You had children.

This was hardly an idyllic system. People often had children they did not choose to have. Women had far less control over reproduction, education and careers. Relationships could be unequal or coercive. Romanticizing that world would be a serious mistake.

But we may have moved from one extreme assumption to another.

Parenthood was once something people were expected to enter whether or not they were ready.

Now it can feel like something people should enter only once they are completely ready.

That is a very high bar.

We don't merely expect parents to feed, shelter and love children anymore.

A good parent should understand attachment. Nutrition. Emotional regulation. Screen time. Language development. School choice. Neurodiversity. Sleep. Socialization. Online safety. Extracurricular activities. Mental health.

Preferably while maintaining a successful career, healthy marriage, active friendships, financial plan and recognizable individual identity.

The OECD has actually identified the rise of intensive parenting norms—the expectation that parents devote more time and money to each child—as one factor changing the perceived costs of parenthood.

This produces a peculiar historical outcome.

Children may never have been more treasured.

And raising one may never have seemed more demanding.

We have made childhood increasingly precious while making parenthood increasingly intimidating.

The real price of a child isn't only money

When economists discuss fertility, they understandably talk about costs.

Housing matters enormously. So do childcare, income and employment security. OECD analysis finds a clear negative relationship between housing costs and fertility, while policies that make work and family easier to combine can help.

But I think there is another cost that is harder to put into a spreadsheet.

Call it the risk premium of parenthood.

A couple doesn't need to know only whether they can afford diapers next month.

They are implicitly asking themselves whether they can absorb twenty years of uncertainty.

What happens if one of us loses a job?

What if childcare falls through?

What if we need a bigger home?

What if our child needs additional support?

What happens to my career?

Could we afford a second child?

Would our relationship survive the pressure?

This may help explain why a one-time government cheque rarely transforms fertility behaviour. A payment can reduce the price of having a baby.

It cannot remove the uncertainty of becoming responsible for another human being.

And modern adulthood has become remarkably good at teaching us to avoid irreversible decisions.

We rent.

We subscribe.

We change employers.

We move cities.

We update.

We upgrade.

We keep our options open.

Much of the modern economy is built around optionality.

Parenthood is almost the opposite.

There is no free trial.

No return policy.

No version upgrade next year.

You choose someone you have never met, with needs you cannot predict, and reorganize a large part of your life around them.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that parenthood feels increasingly anomalous in a culture designed around flexibility.

We may have mistaken postponement for rejection

Something else happens when enough people say later.

Later becomes fewer.

Canada illustrates this clearly. Fertility among younger women has fallen considerably over time while births have shifted toward older ages.

For an individual, postponement can be perfectly rational.

Finish school first.

Establish a career first.

Find the right person first.

Save some money first.

Get a home first.

There is nothing unreasonable about any of those decisions.

The problem emerges at the level of an entire life.

Modern society has created a long runway toward adulthood, but biology has not lengthened its timetable by the same amount.

We spend more years acquiring education.

More years establishing careers.

More years becoming financially secure.

Often more years finding a stable partner.

And then we are surprised when the window available for building the family someone imagined at 23 feels considerably narrower at 36.

What looks like a fertility decision may therefore be the accumulated result of dozens of perfectly reasonable earlier decisions.

No single one caused it.

Together they did.

We focus on babies when perhaps we should focus on adulthood

Governments concerned about fertility tend to intervene near the end of the process.

A baby bonus.

A tax credit.

Parental leave.

Subsidized childcare.

These can matter. In fact, there is good evidence that coherent family policies help people combine employment and parenthood. But even the OECD notes that generous family supports alone have not restored replacement-level fertility across many countries that provide them.

Perhaps that is because much of the fertility problem begins before anyone is pregnant.

Can young adults afford to establish independent households?

Do they have enough stability to imagine where they will be five years from now?

Are people forming durable relationships?

Do workplaces treat parenthood as a normal part of human life or as an inconvenient interruption?

Do men and women believe parenting and household work will be shared fairly?

Do communities make family life easier—or leave every household to solve the same problems privately?

These are not fertility policies in the traditional sense.

They are questions about the architecture of adulthood.

And fertility may simply be one of the places where weaknesses in that architecture become visible.

There is another uncomfortable part of the story: finding someone

Money receives most of the attention because it is measurable.

Relationships are messier.

Yet 14 percent of respondents in the UNFPA research cited difficulty finding a suitable partner as something that had affected or could affect their desired family size.

This deserves far more attention than it gets.

Most children are still born from something that no government can easily manufacture: two people meeting, choosing one another and remaining together long enough to imagine raising another person.

And that process itself appears to be changing.

Dating has become simultaneously easier and harder. We can encounter more potential partners than perhaps any generation before us, while selection has become increasingly optimized, filtered and disposable.

We have more choice.

Choice does not necessarily produce commitment.

There is an interesting parallel here.

Housing insecurity delays family formation.

Employment insecurity delays family formation.

Relationship insecurity can do exactly the same thing.

In all three cases the underlying issue may be less poverty than confidence in continuity.

Parenthood requires a strangely old-fashioned belief:

I think enough of this will still be here tomorrow.

My partner.

My income.

My home.

My community.

My future.

Perhaps declining fertility tells us something about how difficult that sentence has become.

Children have moved from contributors to investments

There is also a much longer historical story hiding underneath all of this.

For much of human history, children participated relatively early in the economic life of their households. That could involve farming, domestic work, caring for siblings, apprenticeships or family businesses.

Again, that world was often harsh, and reducing child labour is one of modernity's great achievements.

But it changed the economics and meaning of childhood.

In wealthy societies, children gradually moved from being economic contributors to becoming recipients of extraordinary investments of time, education and resources.

That is a remarkable civilizational accomplishment.

Yet it creates another paradox.

As societies become wealthier, safer and more committed to giving each child a rich childhood, parents often concentrate more resources in fewer children.

The goal shifts from:

Can we raise another child?

toward:

Can we give another child the life we believe a child should have?

Those are very different questions.

A family may technically be able to afford three children and still decide it can properly raise only two.

Or two and decide on one.

The falling fertility rate may therefore reflect not a declining valuation of children, but in some cases an increasing valuation of each individual child.

That possibility is easy to miss.

Maybe we are asking the wrong people to solve the problem

Fertility debates often become strangely accusatory.

Why aren't women having babies?

Why are young people waiting so long?

Why are people prioritizing careers?

Why don't couples simply have another child?

These questions place the burden at the very end of a long causal chain.

It would be like designing a city in which restaurants close at six, buses stop at seven, apartments cost twice the average salary and nobody can find childcare—and then launching a campaign asking residents why they don't go out more.

People respond to environments.

That doesn't mean they lack agency. Nor does it mean everyone secretly wants children. Some people genuinely do not, and a decent society should respect that decision completely.

The more interesting question concerns people who do want children but repeatedly encounter reasons to wait, stop, or have fewer than they imagined.

The UNFPA calls this a problem of reproductive agency: the ability to have the number of children one wants, when one wants them—not simply a national target for increasing births.

I think that is the more useful way to frame the issue.

Not:

How do we convince people to produce more children?

But:

What prevents people from building the families they already say they want?

Those questions lead to very different societies.

A civilization reveals its priorities through what it makes easy

We often say that families matter.

But values can be measured partly through infrastructure.

What receives space?

What receives time?

What gets subsidized?

What is protected when budgets tighten?

What does a successful life look like?

What does a successful employee look like?

What kind of home can an ordinary young family afford?

How many logistical systems does a parent have to coordinate before getting to work at nine in the morning?

These sound like mundane questions.

They may be demographic ones.

Because a civilization doesn't communicate its priorities only through speeches.

It communicates them through the lives it makes possible.

Perhaps the most revealing fact about falling fertility isn't that fewer babies are being born.

It is that so many adults look at parenthood—something many of them still say they want—and conclude that they should wait until life becomes a little more secure.

A little more affordable.

A little less exhausting.

A little more certain.

And then life moves.

Maybe the question was never simply why people aren't having children.

Maybe the more uncomfortable question is:

What have we built that makes having the children people want feel like such a difficult leap?