When 37-year-old Heather Marcoux was expecting her son several years ago, she and her husband assumed it would be the first of several pregnancies.
“We certainly thought we had more than one,” says Marcoux, who lives in Alberta, Canada. But today, the parents are very clear that their son, now of primary school age, will never have a sibling. “We can provide our only child with a fairly good standard of living,” she says. “But if we added more children, it would drop significantly.”
It’s partly a financial decision; even with Marcoux and her husband’s income combined, childcare is a struggle and it’s impossible to save significantly. But it also has to do with a lack of support and doubts about the future.
“I feel like another child would be a burden we just couldn’t handle,” Marcoux said. “No one wants to view their growing family as a burden. It sucks to say. But some days we just think that what we’re trying to do with one seems so impossible. How could we do [our day-to-day lives] work with more? Some family members are disappointed with our choice, but the world is just different now.
The global birth rate is falling. It’s not necessarily news; it has been declining since 1950, according to data collected by the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau based in Washington, DC. But the decline in recent years has been particularly brutal: in 2021, the global fertility rate is 2.3 births per woman; in 1990 it was 3.2. A new survey from the Pew Research Center has found that a growing percentage of childless American adults between the ages of 18 and 49 intend to stay that way. In every European nation, fertility in 2021 was below the 2.1 births per woman generally considered the “replacement rate” for a population. In a number of these countries, birth rates have reached record highs.
It is not difficult to imagine why young people are reluctant to have large families. Financial stability is harder to achieve than ever. One in 10 non-retired Americans say their finances may never recover from the pandemic and that significant inflation could be looming in Europe. In many places home ownership is anything but a pipe dream. Political and civil unrest is rife across the world and the climate is in crisis. It is easy to adopt a gloomy view of the future.
“The central explanation is the rise of uncertainty,” said Daniele Vignoli, professor of demography at the University of Florence, in his keynote address at a research workshop hosted on Zoom by the European University Institute. “The increasing speed, dynamics and volatility” of change on many fronts, he explains, “make it increasingly difficult for individuals to predict their future.”
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