Baby Bust – Why?

By Shlomo Maital

 Why are married couples in the West having fewer children? What is the underlying cause of the “baby bust”?  I was born in 1942, at nearly the bottom of the fertility decline driven by the Depression and World War. Good thing for me my mother and father believed in the future, however bleak it looked at the time. (The graph shows babies per 1000 persons, in the US, from around 1910 to 2010.)

       A study of 1,858 men and women aged 20-45, in the U.S., was published in the New York Times, July 7-8 (international edition).   For those who said they “expected to have fewer children than they thought ‘ideal’ “   here are the main reasons:

     Child care is too expensive (64%), want more time for the children I have (54%), worried about the economy (49%), can’t afford more children (44%), worried because of financial instability (42%), not enough paid family leave (39%).

     (Of course, the numbers add up to more than 100% — most respondents cited more than one reason).

     The conclusion is, as the heading of the article states, “Baby bust rooted in economics”. Somehow, couples in the US (and probably, in Europe and Japan, and China as well) feel that children are too costly.

     Demographers know that the ‘demographic transition’ (sharp fall in fertility as countries grow wealthier) happens everywhere. But the ‘baby bust’ has followed a huge baby boom, that brought economic growth to the US.   Baby busts do the opposite.

     I would not be on this earth, if my mother and father had said, times are tough, we just came out of a Depression, we can’t afford another child, and besides, there is terrible war, how can you bring babies into such a world?   Instead, they looked to the future with hope and optimism.

      My own country Israel defies the trend. We are having a baby boom. Fertility rates have risen, for nearly all segments of society. Israel has 180,000 babies yearly. They bring us happiness and hope for the future. Why? Our young people believe babies are ‘cool’.

   How is it, that today, when people are relatively affluent, they feel too poor to have babies, when in the past, when people were relatively poor, they felt affluent enough to have children, whatever the state of the world?

   I am puzzled.