Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the ‘fertilisation president’, whilst J.D. Vance has said, ‘to put it simply, I want more babies in America’.
Across the world, countries are trialling increasingly creative and dramatic policies to try to reverse the fertility decline. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s self-proclaimed mission is ‘procreation, not immigration’, mothers with two or more children are now exempt from income tax for life.
If Trump wants to boost the birth rate, then he needs to make parenting joyful again
Yet none of them have shown any signs of real success. South Korea has spent more than $200 billion (£150 billion) over the past 16 years on family-friendly policies, and yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 per cent in that time. If its current birth rate (0.78) continues, its population of 51 million will decline to 15 million by 2100. France spends a higher percentage of its GDP on families than any other OECD country, but last year it saw its lowest number of births since the second world war.
The reason these initiatives fail is that low birth rates are an existential problem, not an economic one. Of course, costs such as the expensive childcare and inflated house prices are one reason for fewer and smaller families. Yet they do not explain why Wales has the UK’s lowest birth rate (where property is, relatively, inexpensive), or why Latvia has the same birth rate as the UK despite much lower rents. It also doesn’t explain why wealthier couples have fewer children, or why in Nordic countries, with their generous childcare and parental leave schemes, the birth rate remains stubbornly low.
Government interventions do not work because they do not compensate for the opportunity cost of having children. Modern life frames parenthood in terms of what you give up rather than what you gain: not only in terms of your career but in every aspect of your lifestyle. Whether it’s due to social media, capitalism or TV shows like Motherland, people are acutely aware of the opportunities lost through having children: you see your friends less, eat out less, travel less, go to the gym less, are less likely to take up a promotion if it means longer hours.
Yet despite the perceived challenges and sacrifices of having children, people still want them. One study found that, in OECD countries, men say that they want 2.2 children on average and women say 2.3: above replacement levels. However, they actually end up having 1.6 on average. This gap is partly due to delaying the age at which you have your first child; people assume they need to ‘make the most of your twenties’, when fulfilment means fun, freedom, furthering your career, and finding yourself (or, as is becoming increasingly difficult, finding someone to settle down with).
As a result, people fear missing out. When I asked some married friends if they wanted to have children soon, they said they did eventually, but that they had too much they wanted to do and achieve first. This makes sense: the fewer people have babies, the less you are exposed to them, and the less likely you are to realise that having children expands your life as much as restricts it. For many men in particular (who are too often left out of conversations around falling birth rates and who, because of our atomised society, have maybe never even held a baby), settling down and having children has become this strangely terrifying prospect: not so much a natural transition or evolution but more like throwing yourself off a cliff.
For women, expectations around parenting are also both impossibly high and impossibly low. Women have been told they must juggle raising well-rounded, successful, emotionally stable children whilst pursuing a career. They have been told they can ‘have it all’ but do not receive anywhere near enough support to do so. We have removed the extended family and community networks that make parenting more manageable, and no subsidy can compensate for these huge social and cultural changes.
If Trump wants to boost the birth rate, then he needs to make parenting joyful again. Doom-mongering about economic downturns and impending social collapse is unlikely to inspire anyone to have more children, a decision that normally signals confidence in the future. To quote John F. Kennedy, GDP measures ‘everything except that which makes life worthwhile’. Yet joy is a hard thing for a policy to promise: how can the state deal with intangible incentives like purpose, belonging or love? Parenting is about finding meaning, and this is something that money can’t buy.
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