Here’s The Real Reason Why Our Birth Rate Is Plummeting

We have talked a lot over the years about the decline in the birthrate and the rapidly increasing number of young adults who are refusing to get married and have children. As much as we’ve discussed the subject, we still have not discussed it enough. It is one of the great crises facing our civilization at the present moment. When a society gives up on having children, it has given up on its future, given up on itself.

Of course, plenty of people are still having children. We haven’t entered full on “Children of Men” territory quite yet. Our population is still growing, just as the population of the world is still growing. But that growth is slowing. And we have long since crossed the crucial threshold where our fertility rate is now below replacement level. We are no longer having enough babies to replace older people as they die off. As a consequence, our population itself grows older and more top heavy. All kinds of complications follow form this, and those complications quickly turn into catastrophes. 

We have discussed many aspects of this problem. But it’s a problem so deep and all-encompassing that there are always going to be new dimensions to explore. A few days ago, the New York Times, engaging in another random act of journalism (as Rush Limbaugh used to call it), published a piece homing in on a facet of the birth rate decline that, until now, hadn’t gotten much press, if any at all. The article is titled: “The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent.” The piece, by Catherine Pearson, has gotten a decidedly mixed reaction. Some people — myself included — found it to be a profoundly sad yet very empathetic and very interesting look at a group of people who are suffering in a unique way from our society’s plummeting birth rate. But other people were angry and offended, for reasons we’ll talk about in a moment. 

First let’s read a bit of this: 

“Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favorite copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit” since her three children — now in their 20s and 30s — were young.

She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family’s home with books. (All of her children could read before they started school, Ms. Birk recalled with pride.) She hoped one day to be a “cool” grandma who would share her favorite stories with a new generation.

But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is “right for them,” Ms. Birk said, it still breaks her heart. “I don’t have young children anymore, and now I’m not going to have grandchildren,” she said. “So that part of my life is just over.”

Like Ms. Birk, a growing number of Gen Xers and baby boomers are facing the sometimes painful fact that they are never going to become grandparents. A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 percent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more U.S. adults say they’re unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just don’t want to.”

The article continues with more anecdotes along these lines. I won’t post them all here. But you should read them for yourself. They’re quite sad. And quite illuminating. There are many older people these days with children who swear they will never have children of their own. The reasons they give for remaining childless are all very similar. They point to the economy, the state of the world, climate change, and so on. None of them feel they have any obligation to have kids and carry on the family name and the bloodline. They are thinking only about themselves and what would make them most comfortable. And they’ve decided that they are most comfortable being childless and alone. Their parents will just have to deal with the loneliness and grief. That’s the general attitude.

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It’s also the attitude of many commenters on this article. There’s plenty of sympathy for the would-be grandparents. But there’s also a lot of this sort of thing: 

Boo hoo.  Get over yourself.  I chose not to have children.  That is/was my choice, which was clear from day one with my spouse.  He married me on those terms.  I am not responsible for my parents’ happiness, they are.  They tried to guilt me into it during the first few years I was married but eventually gave up.  It was never their choice to make.

A similar message in this comment: 

I feel it is extremely self centered of any person who expects others to make decisions that will make them happy. Too many parents try to live their lives vicariously through their children. Children do not owe their parents everything. Besides, many of us were forced to babysit our younger siblings. I had 18 years of watching my 3 younger siblings AND having to work in my mother’s day care center! My God, if I had had my own children I would have ended up spending my entire life raising children. My purpose in life is not to watch/raise children. With the recent parental theory/practice of making the oldest child the ‘third parent’ (making them help raise their younger siblings) you can expect that more people will reject parenthood when they become adults.

I have to clarify one thing here. It is a not a “recent theory” that older children should help care for their younger siblings. This is in fact how all human societies have worked since the dawn of our species. This commenter is suggesting that “more people” are rejecting parenthood because they were raised in the same way that billions of humans have been raised since time immemorial. This is a common theme. People with absolutely no understanding of human history have decided that the challenges they have faced are utterly unprecedented, when in fact they haven’t dealt with a single thing that billions of other people haven’t also dealt with. And those billions of people had families in spite of it.

In any case, this article also went viral on X. The commentary there was very similar.

A couple of examples: 

Unspoken? my parents never shut the f up about wanting grandkids. dont f up the economy for your children and then get surprised when they can’t afford kids.

Another one says: 

These grandparents should have built enough generational wealth so their kids would feel financially secure enough to start a family. “The unspoken grief of not being a trustfund nepobaby who can easily support a family.”

Obviously we hear this excuse constantly. We’re told that people aren’t having kids today because “the economy” makes it impossible. This person blames the brith rate decline on a lack of “generational wealth.” Let me reiterate a point I made on Twitter/X, which seems to have upset a lot of people. Now I’ll upset them again. The economy is not preventing anyone from starting a family or having children. I am not denying that the economy is in poor shape at the moment. But that is not a good reason for a society to give up on the family. If anything, it’s all the more reason not to give up.

You don’t need “generational wealth” to start a family. I didn’t have any generational wealth when I started mine. Many of you are familiar with my story. I was broke when I got married. The economy wasn’t exactly humming at the time either. We were just climbing out of the Great Recession. I was living in an apartment on a meager salary. So broke that I frequently had to pay for gas with the spare change in the cupholder in my car. We weren’t in much better shape when we had our first two kids. We didn’t buy our first house until we already had three kids. You do not need to be rich to start a family. You do not need to come from a rich family. You do not need a strong economy. Economies ebb and flow. They go up and they go down. If you ever have kids, it is guaranteed that you will have kids during a weak economy. It may be strong now, but you’ll still be a parent ten years from now when it dips again. It may be weak now, but you’ll be a parent ten years from now when it’s stronger. This is how economies work.

It’s why you can’t wait around for the economy to permit you to move on with your life and do the things that you are meant to do as a human being.

I share my own story as an example because it’s my story, but because I want you to know that I’ve actually done the thing I’m advocating for. But of course even at my brokest point I was still “rich” compared to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived on Earth. You, right now, no matter what your financial situation, are richer than almost everyone who has ever lived. People with fewer resources than you have been reproducing since the beginning of human civilization. Literally billions of people have done the thing that we are now told can’t be done unless you have $100,000 in savings. If people had this attitude in the past, the human species wouldn’t exist anymore.

So, you can’t afford to start a family? How can that be? How can it be that you can’t afford it, and yet billions of people have afforded it with less? How is it that you “can’t” do something that has been done under more difficult circumstance billions of times? I am often told by younger people that the situation now is just too difficult, everything is too expensive, I just don’t understand, I can’t relate. It’s like they think the history of the world started 45 minutes ago. If you think the challenges you face today are so unprecedented that they mean we should stop reproducing as a species then you simply have no understanding of world history. You don’t know what the world was like. You don’t know what your ancestors had to deal with. You don’t even know what people ten years older than you had to deal with.

People have been through recessions, depressions, famines, wars, catastrophes of all kinds. And they continued having children. They continued building families. Sure, fertility rates have gone up and down over the years and decades. But there has never been a time when mass amounts of young adults have simply sworn off parenthood altogether. That has never happened until now. 

Do you really think you face greater hurdles than your great great grandparents did during the Great Depression? Do you really think it’s harder to have a family now than it was when the Black Death was wiping out a third of the population of Europe? Yes, these days young families may struggle to buy a starter home. I did, too, in my early 20s. If there was ever a time when it was easy for someone in their 20s to afford a nice home, that time lasted for like 30 seconds 40 years ago. It was never like that before, and hasn’t been like it since. Get over it. Most people in the history of Earth could never dream of living in any kind of home at all. In fact, for most people who’ve ever lived, the greatest challenge in starting a family was that half of their kids wouldn’t live past infancy. And yet they still started families. They still forged on.

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The truth is the economy isn’t stopping anyone from having kids. It’s not that they can’t afford it. It’s that they don’t want to make the sacrifices it requires. They’d have to give up a certain measure of comfort in order to start a family, and they don’t want to do that. For most of the people who say they can’t afford kids, that’s what they mean. That’s how we can end up in a situation where someone “Can’t afford kids” even though they are wealthier and more comfortable than billions of people who somehow could afford kids.

What they really mean to say is they can’t afford the same level of luxury and comfort while also having kids. This is not a matter of affordability. It’s a matter of priority. A lot of people today prioritize their own pleasure and enjoyment over anything and everything else.

The irony, of course, is they so often end up with far less pleasure and enjoyment than people who don’t prioritize it. The truth is you can start a family and have kids and then down the line end up far richer than you were when you were childless. I’m a testament to that. Millions of other examples are available. But one of the most basic realities of life is that if you want more, you have to be willing to risk what you already have. You have to put your chips on the table. If you won’t do that, you’ll be stuck in exactly the spot you’re in right now forever. Until eventually you lose that too. 

That brings me to the final point I want to make. We heard those responses to the New York Times article from people who insisted, quite indignantly, that they don’t owe it to anyone to have kids. But actually, you kind of do. Nobody will tell you this.

Nobody will talk about the obligation to start a family. The idea that any of us have any obligations at all is of course anathema to the modern mind. We are deeply distressed by the thought that we owe anything to anyone, ever. But you can be distressed all you want. I’ll say what no one else will say to you: You do actually owe it. You have a duty. There are exceptions. Some people are called to a life of service apart from biological parenthood. Some people simply can’t have kids. There are other vocations human beings can have. But most of us are called to start families. And for those of us who are called, we do owe it, we do have a debt to pay.

Your ancestors suffered and bled and died to build the civilization you live in now, and give you all of the comforts and luxuries you take for granted. They lived lives that were, by our standards, brutal and short and impoverished. They built their lives by hand, from scratch. They built this civilization from scratch. You think you can’t afford children. You have a grandfather not all that far back in your lineage who built a one bedroom cabin by hand and shared it with your grandmother and 8 kids, one of whom gave birth to the person who gave birth to the person who gave birth to you. You experience more comfort and luxury in a single day then that man did in his entire life. His life would have been easier if he never had kids. But he had them, because he wanted you to exist. He was actually thinking 100 years into the future — 200 years, 300 years. You come from a long line of people who actually cared about what the world would look like in the distant future, even as you only care about what you’re going to have for lunch this afternoon.

You don’t have just one grandfather like that. Your bloodline was carried on through the centuries by men and women of this type. They carried your family name and your lineage and your history and everything that makes you, you — they carried it on their backs, and suffered for its sake. And now after all of that, after those thousands of years of struggle and strife just to bring you into this world, you’re going to shrug your shoulders and refuse to continue. They ran marathons, handed you the baton, and you’re going to just sit down in a lawn chair and say, “Sorry, you all wasted your efforts. The race ends here. I don’t feel like running.” You’re going to wipe out your lineage and bloodline just so that you have more time to watch Netflix? Thousands of years of toil end with you, by your own choice, because you just can’t be bothered. That is a failure of historic proportions. It is a failure to live up to your obligation. Because yes you have an obligation to the people who built this world — you have an obligation to continue what they built.

I’m not saying this is the most compelling argument. To a lot of people these days, the idea that they should have any respect for their ancestors, much less that have any obligations to them, is totally foreign. I realize that. We are a culture severed from its own past, living a perpetual state of now, as though the past never happened and the future will never happen. That’s how you end up with people who act as though they’re facing unprecedented financial hardships because they can’t afford to buy a three bedroom house at the age of 23. I understand all of that. But what I’m saying is still true, all the same.

So if your parents are sad that you aren’t giving them any grandchildren, this is why. They have every right to be sad. They are mourning not only their own loneliness, but also the fact that you are choosing to squander ten thousand years of work. They are mourning the extinction of their bloodline. And they are wondering what the point of any of this ever was, if it all ends like this, it all ends with you, for no good reason.