"I Can't Possibly Have A Kid Until I Achieve X, Y, and Z."
Everyone will tell you that you're never ready -- and this is part of the fertility rate story in America. We created a prerequisites problem.
Let’s commence with this video. I don’t love the narrator’s voice, and some of the points are generic, but in general, it tells a pretty good story:
Since I myself realized that my “boys” (sperm) don’t swim good, I’ve thought a lot about fertility and birth rate challenges beyond just myself and my spouse. It’s an interesting topic, and while no one in the throes of raising three kids would ever think about it, it does have a lot (perhaps even a lot) of downstream implications for broader society, work, propping up the elderly, etc.
This above video makes a point that has definitely been made before, although it’s not a common point in these discussions. Here’s the basic breakdown:
Find a flux capacitor and head back to, say, 1952.
Then, more people were willing to have babies while in college, or while finishing their education.
Admittedly, that is partially (largely?) a function of females not having as many choices for their life.
Now flash back to 2024.
Many women (and men) believe there are certain “prerequisites” to being “ready” for kids, which is hysterical because anyone you meet will tell you that no one is ever truly ready. Usually those pre-reqs include: education, early-to-mid-stage career, and home.
But, A-HA! A wrinkle!
Now we’re at a point where:
Education is usually pretty expensive (varies by person, degree desired, virtue-signaling, etc.)
Housing is almost always pretty expensive (we shifted the definition of “home” since 1953 too, from “a place you gather with loved ones” to “an asset class”).
Careers take time to build, especially for women, who are still marginalized in most organizational settings.
If you take those three bullets above, and then you add in how bad dating apps are and how young men and young women seemingly cannot talk to each other anymore —
— then it’s easy to see why the live birth rate has fallen from 2.3 to 1.7 since 2006. It’s harder to meet people, it’s harder to date people and have things to actually talk about (“So, do you listen to Rogan?”) and if you believe that you need to check three-four major life boxes before Bouncing Baby Boogers arrives, well, that’s hard because of costs. Bonus: a woman’s fertility window is just that: a window. (Man, I used two colons in that sentence. My 9th-grade English teacher would slaughter me.) It’s harder to conceive a kid at 36 than 28. Some might even argue much harder. So if your window starts on the higher end, that’s going to adjust the live birth rate as well.
In that same video above, they present some “desired fertility” vs. “actual family size” charts. Here is one, for example:
A woman’s “desired fertility rate” is pretty standard at 2–4 kids. But increasingly, they’re getting 1–2. Obviously, there are a lot of inputs to that (I’d argue mostly economic), but some of it is time, fertility windows, husbands being losers (I know six women who wanted more kids, but realized on the first kid that their husband didn’t do anything domestic), general health, etc.
I’d also argue that we tend to call things like this “a crisis,” but I’d argue it’s a bigger “crisis” if people are having more kids than they can afford or emotionally support, because that creates more downstream societal problems. If more people have just one kid, but that kid is loved and supported and not babied excessively, that’s actually good for humanity. It's probably bad for toxic bosses who need bodies and call them “workers,” but it’s good for people. And isn’t that a win-win?