The real reasons birth rates are declining worldwide

The fall is astonishing. At its height, the global fertility rate hit 5.3 births per woman in 1963, but it has been in near-constant decline ever since. Sixty years on, it is now only around 2.2. In many countries, it is far lower than the roughly 2.1 babies per woman that would sustain current population sizes, known as the replacement rate.

There is no shortage of explanations touted for this global trend, and these are easily tinged by personal or political beliefs: having children has become too expensive, women are too busy working and there isn’t enough childcare support.

With the birth rate now sitting at about 1.4 to 1.6 in countries like the UK, Australia and the US – and as low as 1.2 in Japan and 0.75 in South Korea – our understanding of the global fertility decline has so far been driven by demographers, who take whole-population views and try to predict the future.

What this misses, argues Paula Sheppard, a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford, are the nuances: which groups of society are having fewer children, and the different reasons why.

Her more individual-based approach is unpicking the real reasons why men and women are delaying starting a family, and having fewer children when they do.

From urban isolation to modern office work, she tells New Scientist why her research is revealing how modern life is at odds with the way our species evolved to raise its young – and the one factor that people care about the most when deciding how many children to have.

Penny Sarchet: There seems to be a lot of panic about birth rates at the moment. 

Paula Sheppard: There’s a misconception: people think they’ve never been this low before, but they’re actually not [a record low]. After the second world war, rates were very low as well, and demographers, politicians and policy-makers were panicking. Demographers were trying to project what the population would look like – would birth rates recover? But the projections made in the late 1940s, when people weren’t having many babies after the war, were lower than what actually turned out to happen. Nobody got it right, because no one predicted the baby boom.

So, it is hard to predict what will happen, but we are below replacement rate. There are very low rates, especially if you look at South Korea and Japan. But also across Europe and North America, no country is above replacement rate.

Is all the alarm about this justified?

I don’t think so. There are [nearly] 9 billion people on the planet. We’re not going to go extinct any time soon. There’s also the opposite argument of, “Oh my God, we’ve overpopulated the world. People are starving. Poverty and inequality are terrible.” This is what the younger generation, especially, is thinking about.

But I understand why certain media outlets like to push panic, and certain politicians have their own agendas. I don’t think we should panic, but at the same time, I think if people want to have two or three kids, they should be able to have two or three kids – but often they aren’t.

What do most studies miss when they attempt to investigate falling birth rates? 

One issue is the difference between thinking about things at a population level and thinking about things among individuals on the ground. It’s not super helpful [to do the former]. If you take a country’s total fertility rate, it doesn’t tell you anything about different sectors of society, because different people are doing different things. Poorer people have more kids [than average], and very wealthy people have more kids. There’s more nuance than can be seen at the country level.

You’ve been using a unique approach for studying family planning at a more individual level. How did you go about doing this? 

I did a study in the UK, which I am now planning to expand to other countries, that was a mixed-methods project. We held focus groups, asking people to talk about it, including men as well, as men are often lost from this conversation and I was very keen to hear what they had to say.

From this qualitative work, I derived a shortlist of the most important things to people when it comes to having children: support from families, having a good house, having a committed and hands-on partner – all these sorts of things you might expect.

And then I did a discrete choice experiment, which is quite unusual for this kind of research – I think I’m the first person to do it. It’s quite a well-known method in health economics and transport science. For example, you can use it to investigate why people would choose to take a bus or a train, or how you might persuade more nurses to work in rural areas. So, I used it to ask, how do you make it easier for people to have the number of children they’d like? What do you need to give them?

How does that capture the nuance that is usually missed when investigating birth rates? 

Because the experiment runs online, you can have a much bigger, nationally representative participant pool, which we did, although it is worth noting that the majority of the participants were heterosexual. And I was able to pull out rankings for each of the factors on the shortlist and look at things like how many more months you would be willing to wait to start a family in order to have a hands-on partner or a good house, for example.

What did you find? 

Unsurprisingly, different things for different groups. There was congruence between men and women, but there was much more difference between educational categories.

People who didn’t have a university degree were definitely interested in housing, but they were not [as] interested in mortgages, for example. The men were interested in neighbourhood quality: “I’m not going to have another kid unless I can move to a nicer place, because there’s no green space here and the schools are crap.” And the women were going, “I just want enough space for the kids to run around and a bit of a garden – but I’m not interested in mortgage debt.”

So, if you think about stamp duty holidays [a UK tax measure to encourage home buying], you are only helping the part of the population who want to own a house. But there are people who don’t want that kind of debt and are happy to rent, despite it being so difficult to rent in the UK. So perhaps a two-pronged approach is needed.

How were the people who had been to university different? 

The women who had degrees really wanted fathers to co-parent. Women who didn’t have degrees never talked about wanting guys to change nappies and stuff.  Instead, they talked about committed relationships. The worst-case scenario in the whole experiment was being left alone with a baby as a single mum. But women with higher education wanted fathers to be hands-on, which is a different kind of support.

I’ve wondered if women simply don’t want to have the replacement level of children, and women with more education have more control over how many children they have. But your work has found that they are having fewer children than they would like? 

Absolutely. People still want two or three kids. Not everyone does – there are always some people who don’t want kids at all. But in the UK, for every three babies that are wanted, only two are born.

However, higher-educated women are quite prepared not to have kids unless they’re sure that the father is going to invest as heavily as they are as a co-parent. I think it is because women take a higher career penalty. Women are saying, “It’s not just a year’s maternity leave. I’m going to lose so much more on my progression at work that I need to wait until I’m really established in my career.” That’s what drives the association between education level and having fewer children. The higher-educated men are saying, “When she’s ready, I’m ready”, but those women are waiting for a man who is prepared to muck in.

What did the men who had been to university care most about? 

They were looking for things like job flexibility – the ability to take leave and work from home when needed. That speaks a lot to being able to be a hands-on parent. I think it’s very important to think about better parental leave for men, because that’s beneficial for the kids, as well as the relationships between fathers and their children, and it’s also beneficial for women.

It famously takes a village to raise a child and, due to urbanisation, more people than ever don’t have that village.

This is the crux of the matter. Social support was the most important thing in the study. A defining feature of our species is that female humans are able to have multiple dependent children at once. You don’t see this in chimpanzees, for example. They wait until the offspring is old enough so that if the mother dies, the young can survive, and then they have another one – so every seven years or so. With humans, you can have kids every two years or so, and if the mother dies, the children won’t die because there’s a father, grandparents or a “village”.

This cooperative breeding is literally what makes us human, and in every group I studied, they wanted support from their partner or their parents. The higher-educated women also wanted friends’ support – they wanted to know that there were mothers’ groups they could join and that their friends were also having kids.

It’s often suggested that the high cost of living is why people are having fewer children – that the associated housing and childcare costs have become just too expensive. Did that come out as an important factor in your study?

The cost of living and finances around childcare were important across the board, but, interestingly, not as much as other things like your partner or other sources of social support. This makes sense, because if you have a good support network to rely on, the cost of childcare can be reduced. For instance, if grandparents can take care of the children one or two days a week, that can translate into a fair whack of savings.

You found that higher-educated women see it as unusual to have children before their 30s, which is quite old, anthropologically speaking. What’s driven this? 

I think the reason people are waiting that long is because families are struggling to have all their proverbial ducks in a row before they’re ready to have a family – or have another child. If you made work and parenting more compatible, I think people would have kids younger.

And then, starting a family later leaves people with less time to have as many children as they would ideally want? 

Yes – a lot of the gap between the number of children you want and the number of children you get is driven by delay. And it’s not just in higher-educated women: other women are having babies later, too, in their late 20s.

To what extent does all this apply globally? 

It’s not just Europe. The only part of the world that doesn’t have very low fertility is sub-Saharan Africa, but it’s going that way;  it’s just a matter of time.

But globally, there are completely different things at play. In Bangladesh, for example, fertility is low – around 2 children per family – but women [typically] get married young, around when they’re 18. They have their first baby when they’re 19, their second baby when they’re 22, and then they stop, so they’re also having fewer kids, but it’s nothing to do with this delay business that we are seeing in the UK.

I have heard it said that it’s much easier to bring birth rates down – through education and contraception availability, for example – than it is to get them up. Worldwide, are there any policies that have worked? 

I don’t think there really are. France has the highest fertility rate in western and northern Europe, but it is low – around 1.7 children per woman. That’s attributed to better policies: heavily subsidised childcare, incentives for having children. But, like in Nordic countries, which are leading the way [in gender-equality parenting policies], it still doesn’t translate into big increases. The Nordic countries still have low fertility. Policies can have short-term changes, maybe, but they can’t make everyone start having four kids. There’s no silver bullet.

Amid all the headlines and political commentary around birth rates, what’s the one thing you wish people could know about the issue? 

It is about making parenting and working compatible, whatever that means for different people, and stopping pitting them against each other. They always used to be compatible. Women have always worked and they have always had kids. It’s just that now we live in this patriarchal setting: the office is the office, and children don’t go there. Instead, let’s change this whole culture.