My first night as a dad is seared in my memory.
I remember collapsing into a blue maternity room recliner and bawling my eyes out, overwhelmed by the dizzying mix of terror and gratitude that only parenthood brings. I was in awe at the physical feat my wife had just performed in delivering a human, but that was a small part of it. I was also encumbered and elated by the sheer responsibility of having this human life placed in my care.
It is beyond my skill as a writer to describe my mental and emotional state that first evening, physically exhausted, engulfed by the burden of love. But one of my clearest memories is standing in the nursery at 4 a.m., gazing at that tiny, priceless, sleeping face, before the nurse gently informed me that my baby was actually two bassinets down and that I was staring at someone else’s child.
My wife, our baby, and this stranger’s baby were all housed in an overflow wing of Sibley Memorial Hospital. The hospital hadn’t been able to expand yet in reaction to the surge of babies born in the area, which mirrored the nation as a whole.
Having a baby back then was cool. Frankly, Katie and I were riding a trend by having Lucy in the year 2006.
All the biggest celebrities in America had babies in 2006. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt welcomed a baby in May, the day after Gwen Stefani gave birth. Britney Spears had her second kid with Kevin Federline in September. Heidi Klum and Seal had a baby about a week before my wife and I did. And of course, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes welcomed little Suri this same year.
Almost 4.3 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2006, the most born since the Baby Boom, and a big 3% jump from the prior year. “A baby boomlet,” the media declared. “The United States has a higher fertility rate than every country in continental Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan,” explained the Associated Press.
And then everyone hopped on the bandwagon, trying to emulate Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and me. In 2007, America broke the prior record, set in 1957, by having 4,317,000 babies. The stars were aligned for it. Stefani, Jolie, Klum, and Holmes were all from Generation X, which had already proved a more fruitful generation than the Baby Boomers before them. Britney Spears was a borderline Millennial, one of the largest generations in American history, being the echo of the Baby Boom. The populous Millennial generation was just entering prime baby-making years. Could this be a second American Baby Boom?
It wasn’t.
Inflation flared up. The housing market peaked and began to come down. When my wife and I had our second child in 2008, births were falling below 2006 levels. Then the bottom fell out. The banks all failed and the economy plunged into its deepest recession, sending millions into unemployment — 10% of the workforce in 2009. The stock market lost half its value, demolishing Americans’ retirement savings. Birthrates followed the market’s downward trend.
Beginning in 2009, the economy began a recovery; birthrates did not.
In 2013, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed its previous 2007 high. That year, Miley Cyrus was MTV’s Artist of the Year — her singles “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop,” songs celebrating decadence and depravity, went big. Cyrus went on to explain her intention to never have kids.
“We’re getting handed a piece-of-splanet,” she told Elle, “and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.” Cyrus said she was speaking for all Millennials in proclaiming, “We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it.”
When Katie and I welcomed our sixth child in 2016, we were no longer doing something cool. The whole having-kids fad had flamed out. Angelina had filed for divorce from Brad. Tom and Katie were already split, as were Seal and Heidi. Gwen Stefani was no longer a celebrity coach on the show The Voice — her seat was now filled by Miley Cyrus.
The economy continued to improve. The market doubled again from 2013 to 2019, and unemployment dropped to near-record lows. Yet the birthrate plummeted as fast as it had during the Great Recession.
In 2019, only 3.75 million American babies were born, way down from the 4.3 million in 2007. All this happened as the second-largest generation in American history, the Millennial generation, entered its prime years of family formation. We had more potential parents than ever before, yet we were getting fewer babies from them. Then things got really bad: The pandemic hit and birth numbers fell further, with 2020 clocking the largest one-year drop on record, down 4% to 3.61 million.
For a moment back in 2006, we stood at the cusp of a second Baby Boom, with Suri Cruise, my daughter, and that other random baby at Sibley as the pioneers. But then the Millennials came in like a demographic wrecking ball and knocked us off a cliff — an unprecedented Baby Bust.
How did we go from Baby Boomlet to Baby Bust? The economics and policy matter here. But we should start with Miley Cyrus and her belief system: “We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it.”
Where did the Millennials get this notion?
They’ve been hearing it since grade school.
Breeding like rabbits
“No problem facing the Earth looms larger than the growth of the reproductive rate of the human species,” opined William A. Burley in the New York Times on April 29, 1990. “Virtually all … human suffering can be attributed to the crushing effect of a population that is too numerous for our planet.”
The op-ed, illustrated with a swarm of baby rabbits devouring the Earth as if it were a head of cabbage, didn’t pull punches. “The belief among many cultures that children are the equivalent of wealth is a bankrupt social and economic theory. In the last decade of the twentieth-century, fewer children mean a better life and a healthier environment.”
Burley was not merely trying to reach the readers of the New York Times. He was trying to reach their kids. His op-ed argued that this dark truth about the harms of children must be taught to young children. He was in position to do just this because, as the op-ed page noted, Burley was the principal of the John Pettibone School, a public elementary school in New Milford, Connecticut.
Burley’s students at the time were Millennials. Today he would be teaching the children of Millennials, but the John Pettibone School closed in 2015 due to low and falling enrollment.
“It was heart-wrenching,” the school board chairman told the Litchfield County Times. The board took no joy in its decision, which forced some local kids, accustomed to walking to school, into taking a twice-daily 50-minute bus ride. But the leaders of New Milford keep facing exactly this sort of heart-wrenching decision.
A few years earlier, New Milford Hospital had closed its renowned “Family Birthing Center.” “Declining Birth Rate, Cost of Running Center Led to Decision,” the local paper’s headline declared. Again, heart-wrenching, but once again, it was just a matter of numbers: “In 2009, 343 babies were born at the hospital. By 2011, the number had dropped to 263 babies. The rate during the first three months of 2012 shows a continuing decline.” The drop continued, in the surrounding area, and among New Milfordians in particular.
The population shock that closed Principal Burley’s old elementary school in 2015 soon hit New Milford High School. I was there for the Green Wave’s final football game of the 2021 season. The scene was lively, but longtime residents saw a fading town. “When I was in high school, New Milford was huge,” Dylan McIntyre, a local cop, told me on the sidelines. Since 2007, when New Milford High School was graduating the students born in the months before Principal Burley’s cri de coeur, student population has dropped by 15%. Surrounding towns are doing even worse. “Some of the schools we played combined varsity and freshman teams and only fielded 15 kids,” one football mom told me.
Across town, the old John Pettibone School is now the John Pettibone Community Center. “Gentle Adult Yoga” was the main event when I visited in 2021. In the shadow of the former school building that Sunday, volunteers hosted “Howl O Ween,” in which the robust dog park community provided treats and giveaways while locals dressed up their pups in costumes.
“I don’t have kids,” explained Melissa, in charge of community affairs at Candlewoof Dog Park. “I have a dog. That’s my kid.” Melissa, a married woman in her late forties, was not complaining. “I have two nephews and a niece, and I love them. But I get to sleep in and do what I want.” The other two people at Candlewoof on Friday night were a man named Fabien and a woman named Darcy. Darcy has two children, and Fabien has one.
Melissa, Fabien, and Darcy are all friendly, conscientious, pro-family, and, as evidenced by their volunteer work at the dog park, pro-community. These three, representing three married couples and thus six adults, have a combined three children.
New Milford’s adults aren’t replacing themselves. The only reason the town isn’t shrinking is that adults from smaller dying towns are moving here, thus depopulating their own hometowns even faster. New Milford isn’t extraordinary in this regard. It may just be ahead of the curve.
Baby Bust by the numbers
Any way you count it, the U.S. is undergoing a baby drought.
The Baby Bust began in 2008. That means the average American kindergarten began shrinking in 2013. The average middle school began shrinking in 2019. The Baby Bust hit high schools in 2022, and soon will make impact on college campuses and then the workforce.
We have not only fewer babies; we have fewer children. America was home to 74.2 million children (ages 0-17) in 2010. That number dropped to 73.6 million in the 2020 census and then fell by another million over the next two years. People in their 60s in 2020 outnumbered children under ten.
Here’s an even more depressing way to measure our demographic trajectory: Do more people exit your local hospital in a baby carrier or in a body bag? That is, do you have more births or deaths?
New Milford residents had 396 babies in 1994, just a few years after Principal Burley’s op-ed. That year, 190 New Milfordians died. By 2008, the numbers were not too different: 337 births to 197 deaths. After that, births plummeted and deaths steadily rose. Come 2016, New Milford welcomed 227 babies and said goodbye to 250 of their neighbors.
Zoom out and you see deaths outnumbering births on a larger scale, even before the pandemic. West Virginia lost 23,000 residents in 2019, while only 18,000 babies were born. Deaths also exceeded births in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont in 2019.
This is a lot of numbers, but the most important one is the Total Fertility Rate.
This usage of the word fertility is not specifically about the biological or medical ability to have children. Instead, TFR is a statistical tool used by demographers that begins with the number and pace of births and calculates the average number of babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime. It’s a useful number because it captures long-term trends better than the other birthrate data do, by weeding out ebbs, flows, and other confounding factors. The TFR is the most useful way to compare births across time or places, and so hereafter, where I say “birthrate” I mean “Total Fertility Rate,” unless otherwise specified.
The magic number here is 2.1, known as the “replacement” level. A birthrate of 2.1 indicates that a population will naturally remain flat. Below-replacement birthrate indicates a population will, in the long run, shrink. Above 2.1 and a population will grow.
(Why 2.1? Well, it’s 2 babies as opposed to 1 because men can’t have babies, so women, as usual, need to pick up the guys’ slack. The extra 0.1 is mostly due to the fact that a portion of babies will not survive until childbearing age. Some argue that 2.2 ought to be considered the real replacement level.)
Most of Europe, along with China, Japan, and South Korea, is well below replacement. The birthrate is falling in almost every country in the world, and experts predict that in a few decades, almost all countries will be below replacement.
In 2006, the U.S. was one of only a few wealthy countries above replacement. Since then, we’ve fallen way below the waterline. The U.S., before the pandemic, was nearly half a baby below replacement. If our birthrate decline doesn’t reverse, the U.S. will join South Korea in having a shrinking population year after year.
Following the history of America’s birthrate reveals something about how we got here, and how we might turn things around. Specifically, the tale of the post-World War II Baby Boom gives us a hint about the current Baby Bust and how to create an America that is family-friendly enough to give us our next boom.
Over the first 150 years of American history, the birthrate steadily fell from about 7 to about 3.1. Then it accelerated downward, dropping below 3 in the 1920s. Births didn’t rebound during the Great Depression, and during World War II, America’s birthrate dropped to 2.1.
When the men came home from World War II, birthrates famously went through the roof and stayed there for well over a decade. The U.S. birthrate spiked above 3.5 in 1960, higher than it had been in 50 years. And then almost as quickly as the boom began, it collapsed. The Pill and the sexual revolution brought the fertility rate below replacement for the first time in American history. For most of the 1980s, ’90s, and aughts, the birthrate hovered right below 2.1 babies per woman. Next came the “baby boomlet,” as the American press called it, arriving just a few years into the new millennium. That’s when Tom, Brad, and I had babies.
Then the Great Recession hit and things collapsed. The U.S. birthrate fell from about 2.1 in 2007 down to 1.7 in 2019. Were you to plot the birthrate across U.S. history, you would see two interesting details in the middle of the last century. What is not exceptional is that after men returned from the war in 1945, their wives started having babies. What is exceptional, what shocked demographers, is that the boom wasn’t just a makeup for four lost years. It was a decadeslong, unprecedented, and totally unexpected reversal of the centurieslong trend of falling birthrates. Birthrates in wealthy countries always tended downward, and there had never been a massive, decadeslong reversal of that trend.
Then look at the Great Recession. What’s unexceptional is that a collapse of the economy caused birthrates to fall in 2008 and 2009. What’s surprising to some is that they never rebounded.
The last years with birthrates significantly above 2.1 were in the 1960s. Now the oldest Baby Boomers are pushing 80, and they’re the ones we’re burying today. The pandemic in 2020 and 2021 disrupted death figures and births, but by 2023, births were back on their pre-COVID downward trajectory.
Even without the deaths and foregone births of the pandemic, our population would already be dramatically shrinking if not for immigration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, deaths will consistently exceed births by 2043 in the U.S.
The rest of the wealthy world is a few steps ahead of the U.S. in this flight from fertility. Not a single country in Europe was at replacement level in 2019. Spain and Germany are below 1.5 babies per woman.
Over in Asia, some nations are far worse. South Korea’s fertility rate hit 0.92 in 2019. That is less than one child per woman, a recipe for a rapidly shrinking population. China’s population shrank by more than 800,000 people in 2021, as 10.4 million Chinese died while 9.6 million Chinese babies were born.
India fell below replacement level around 2020, following the same trajectory that South Korea did as it developed economically — except India’s birthrate is far lower than South Korea’s was at this stage in its economic development. Indeed, if you had to pick a single factor to predict whether a country was having enough babies to replace itself, wealth would be the obvious choice — with one exception (more on that later), poor countries are the only ones above replacement.
But poorer countries’ fertility rates are falling, too. The world’s birthrate was about 5 babies per woman in 1964. Since then, it’s been a pretty steady fall, and by 2019, it was less than 2.5 babies per woman. Mexico, which had nearly 7 babies per woman in 1970, fell below replacement level in 2017. Brazil, Malaysia, and Vietnam are among the still-developing nations with below-replacement fertility. Even the still-fruitful are all on downward slopes. Nigeria went from 6.1 babies per woman in 2000 to 5.2 in 2021, and this trend is accelerating.
The world’s birthrate will fall below replacement around 2070, the Pew Research Center calculated in 2019. The odds are that we will turn that corner even earlier.
The demographic story of today is that a wealthier world is having fewer babies, and the wealthiest countries are having the fewest. This makes for a bit of a puzzle, considering that the No. 1 answer given when you ask an adult why they don’t have kids, or more kids, is “we can’t afford it.”
The money excuse
“We don’t want kids,” Nicole told me.
I was walking around the Lower Avenues, a neighborhood in Salt Lake City that looks like it would be the perfect place for a young family. The streets are lined with modest single-family houses with small yards. The sidewalks are shaded with trees, and the neighborhood is peppered with schools and playgrounds. But the only couple I ran into on a lengthy morning stroll was Isaac and Nicole, and they had no interest in raising children here. Why not?
“We can’t afford it,” Nicole said.
I pressed the couple on what made kids so expensive.
“Everything,” Isaac began. “Healthcare — but honestly, it’s just selfishness,” he confessed. “I joke with Nicole, ‘Some people are watching Teletubbies and cleaning up vomit, and we’re going to be drinking margaritas in Paris.’” Moments later, a neighbor greeted the couple, pushing a double stroller through the Avenues — the passengers in the stroller were two Chihuahuas.
Pondering this surreal scene later on, I realized that Nicole and Isaac had concisely stated the two most common explanations I get when I ask ordinary folks why America is undergoing a Baby Bust. And I wondered whether we could fairly pin our Baby Bust on cost or selfishness.
Both of these explanations have an appeal, but they have the same fatal flaw. Yes, both cost and selfishness deter people from having kids or having more kids, but neither explains the change in the birthrate over the past generation. You can no more blame selfishness for a decline in birthrates than you can blame a rash of plane crashes on gravity. Selfishness is as old as Adam and Eve.
Blaming cost almost makes sense. After all, the Baby Bust began in earnest in 2008 and 2009 with the Great Recession. And yes, birthrates seem to fluctuate inversely to housing costs.
First, we need to wrestle with the difficulties of blaming unaffordability for the Baby Bust. The first difficulty is that birthrates are lowest among the people who can most afford births and babies. Poorer countries, remember, generally have higher birthrates, while wealthier countries have lower birthrates. In the U.S., households in poverty had a crude birthrate of 74 babies per 1,000 women. Households with income at least twice the poverty level had a crude birthrate of 44. Keep going up the income ladder, and the birthrate keeps dropping. The richer you are in America today, the fewer kids you have on average (until you get to the very rich, who have more kids).
A closer look at the timing also upends the economic explanation for the Baby Bust. The birthrate was far lower in 2019 than it had been during the Great Recession. From the trough in 2009 to the end of 2019, the stock market nearly quadrupled. Unemployment went from 10% in late 2009 to a startlingly low 3.5% in late 2019. The last time Americans had a job picture as pretty as 2019 was in the heart of the Baby Boom.
Contrary to their self-perception, Millennials are exactly as wealthy as the previous two generations were at their age when adjusted for inflation. The Millennial generation had the same per capita wealth in 2020, when the median millennial was 32 years old, as Gen X had in 2007, when the median Gen Xer was 32.
In a million other measurable ways, America’s wealth seems to make the case that we should be having more kids, not fewer. Cars are safer, information about nutrition for pregnant mothers is better, more Americans can afford more calories of food than ever before. Yet we’re having fewer kids than ever before, and the trends are all in the wrong direction.
So why do so many people say it’s become unaffordable to have kids? It’s not a made-up complaint. Raising kids has become tougher and in ways that at least make it feel more expensive, thus driving down birthrates.
The Baby Bust is the result of cultural shifts that have made America less family-friendly. Neighborhood youth sports have been replaced by time-consuming, money-sucking travel sports. The “good public schools” where upper-middle-class parents make sure to send their kids are in neighborhoods where the home prices and the property taxes are prohibitive for many. The culture demands more “enrichment,” more hovering, more helicoptering of our children, as paranoia of stranger danger creates a rule that good parents are constantly afraid.
Demographers talk about the current “demographic transition”: a shift to high wealth and low birthrates as we “increase investment” in each child. We now take “quality” over “quantity,” sociologists say. “Investment” in our children means driving ourselves crazy, and while it does reduce the quantity of children we have, it doesn’t actually help us or the children we do have. If it did, we wouldn’t see the record rates of childhood anxiety and depression that have defined the 21st century.
Of course we have fewer kids when the time demands of parenting have skyrocketed.
Crucially, we’ve all become less connected to our neighbors and our communities, turning children into an individual burden rather than a community responsibility. Isaac and Nicole’s view of their world didn’t include extended family and a family-friendly community. If they wanted support raising children, they would have to pay for it. Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone told the story of Americans being less connected and more alienated. Of all the consequences of this collapse of community, the most significant is our Baby Bust.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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