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We can avoid the looming fertility crisis with these steps
In my neighborhood, families regularly have five or more children. Playgrounds fill up with 100 or more kids on holidays. Youth multiply on the streets on the way to school or friends’ homes. Meanwhile, families support each other by watching kids, carpooling, establishing meal trains for new mothers, lending or giving away toys and clothes and by doing countless acts of kindness day in and day out.
This kind of high fertility community — and the culture of neighborliness it engenders — used to be the norm everywhere. But today, my neighborhood just north of Washington, D.C., stands out as highly countercultural — an island of fertility in an ever-widening sea of infertility sweeping the world. This natalism isn’t a product of happenstance. It’s largely the result of countercultural norms that governments concerned about low birthrates have the power to foster.
According to the UN Population Division, over two-thirds of the world’s population live in sub-replacement countries. Iran has been below replacement level for a quarter-century. Italy has not seen as few births since before unification in 1861. Even in Africa, rates are dropping, with a few countries now below replacement level. In South Korea, which has the lowest birthrate in the world, less than one-fourth as many babies were born in 2023 than in 1970. With only 0.72 children per woman in 2023, its population will dramatically fall from today’s 51 million to as low as 20 million by the end of the century. Will it have enough soldiers to defend itself from North Korea?
Concerned about how declining populations will affect everything from economic growth to national security, the number of countries trying to increase birthrates grew from 19 in 1986 to 55 in 2015, according to the U.N. These efforts have centered predominantly on providing material incentives that putatively lower the cost of raising kids, such cash handouts, reduced taxes, and subsidized day care. More generous parental leave and reduced work hours have also been dangled. Yet, such efforts to boost birth rates have repeatedly failed. What gives?
Policymakers have neglected to address snowballing cultural norms that have led to fewer marriages and children. Many younger people write off having kids as an undertaking that threatens the climate or spells the end of their personal freedom, financial ease and happiness itself. If everyone you know thinks it’s disadvantageous to get married or have kids, more money is unlikely to change your calculus. The norm that having zero or few kids is a favorable life path then spreads. As the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has written in “Foreign Affairs,” “Many women (and men) may be less keen to have children because so many others are having fewer children.”
My neighborhood, which is overwhelmingly orthodox Jewish, shows how a reimagined set of cultural norms can drive natalism. According to the Pew Research Center, the birth rate of American orthodox Jews is well above three children per woman, with some subgroups reaching much higher numbers.
Yes, orthodox Jewish birthrates are often high worldwide because of religious and cultural factors. But I think our fecund neighborhood reflects another factor at play: the simple normalization of childrearing. From the inside of a high fertility community, young people (as well as anti-natalists and child skeptics) are exposed to the joy and relative ease of handling what can seem to the uninitiated to be an insurmountable, joyless task. Life here is centered on bringing more life into the world, with celebrations for births, birthdays, growth milestones, bar or bat mitzvot, with marriages a regular part of it. When you see your neighbors finding joy in their children despite the daily grind of raising them, the sacrifices that attend childrearing are perceived as easier to bear. And by living in a community whose participants are willing to help each other out each day, raising kids becomes less arduous for all of us.
Changing cultural norms is not easy, but as we have seen with societal views of smoking, homosexuality and teenage pregnancy, it is quite possible. Several academic studies have concluded that “having babies is contagious,” highlighting how our thinking on the subject depends on those near us.
Governments concerned about low birth rates can help reset cultural norms by shifting more of their resources into the development of child-centric, place-based communities. These “neighborhoods of joy” should be designed to attract and bond large families so that they create islands of countercultural norms. This means affordable housing geared towards their needs, highly walkable streets, high quality schools that kids can easily commute to on their own, playgrounds and compelling activities for youth, kid-friendly shops, and sympathetic churches and other houses of worship eager to support norm-setting efforts.
Once these neighborhoods have attracted enough families to establish their own communal ideas of what is normal, they can be incrementally enlarged in ways that incorporate more families, especially those just starting off. The cost for such efforts is modest when compared to the subsidies currently being offered in many countries.
The Japanese town of Nagi offers intriguing evidence of what might be possible. By not only easing the financial burden of having children by offering a range of subsides, but by building a child-centric place-based community, it has been able to achieve a birth rate that is double the Japanese national average — 2.68 in 2021 versus a national average of 1.3. While some of this may be because it attracts families eager to have kids, the community support system and norms are clearly playing a role. As Yuki Fukuda, who has three children, says, “Mothers feel safe having more children; it’s not easy to create those conditions.”
Having children may be a highly personal choice, but social contexts shape our desires, too. Creating neighborhoods where having many kids is daily celebrated and supported can create enough seeds of joy such that we again create societies that prize having babies.
The post The world is running out of children, but there’s a path forward appeared first on Fox News.
