The World Needs Children, Not Child Subsidies

Polling by Redfield & Wilton Strategies shows that 58 percent of Americans are concerned about declining birth rates, with that share rising to 72 percent among those aged 18 to 24. Americans aren’t the only ones — the number of countries with an explicit policy objective to increase fertility is growing. But many proposed ways to boost the birth rate seem to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the decline.

Unfortunately, by some estimates, global fertility is already below replacement. According to Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, the global birth rate fell below replacement in 2023. The “age of depopulation” has begun.

There is probably more than one cause driving the trend of falling birth rates, but widespread beliefs about the value of children play a role. Too often, policymakers and social scientists overlook the importance of questions of meaning in their discussions of fertility rates. Note that meaning is not the same as happiness — it instead refers to the sense that what one is doing matters. A firefighter may find his career both meaningful and stressful, decreasing his day-to-day happiness but giving him a deep feeling of fulfillment.

The economist Catherine Pakaluk in her book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, which my colleague Alex Nowrasteh deemed the best book of 2024, surveyed college-educated women raising five or more children in the United States. She sought to understand their motivations. The women she interviewed all viewed having children as deeply meaningful, almost always for religious reasons. “As I started to make sense of the data in front of me, I realized that the story was the extraordinary value they placed on children,” Pakaluk said of her findings. It is “not a story about lower costs.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that reducing financial costs for families through expensive government subsidies has proved largely ineffective at raising birth rates to meet official targets. Birth rates continue to fall in many countries with generous family spending, and a growing body of research suggests that economics and government policies cannot fully account for shrinking family sizes. Estimates suggest that the United States would need to spend an additional $250 billion annually — or about one-third of the defense budget — to raise fertility by just 0.2 children per woman, which would still leave the rate at below replacement level. (The U.S. fertility rate is around 1.7.)

Of course, it is still a good idea to reform onerous regulations, from burdensome car seat requirements to tariffs that decrease access to baby formula, that artificially increase costs for parents. “The work that parents do raising the next generation of human beings is important—and arduous enough without the government making it harder,” as I’ve written previously. But it’s crucial to recognize that people choose how many children to have for reasons based not solely on costs but also on benefits, including meaningfulness.

Israel presents an interesting case study for demographers. It is the only country belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with above-replacement fertility. Its birth rate is higher than that of many countries that spend a far higher percentage of gross domestic product on family benefits, and while religiosity boosts the country’s birth rate, even the country’s nonreligious population has above-replacement fertility. That seems to be because Israelis, including secular ones, largely view having children as intensely meaningful.

“Perhaps it would be crude and simplistic to say that Israelis want their country to have a future, and want their descendants to be part of it — but then again, such a reading might not be all that far off base,” the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has noted. Another observer noticed that Israelis harbor “an unmistakable sense that having children is about something bigger than each of them individually.” They view having children as essential to their society’s future.

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist (i.e., a specialist focusing on how people seek out meaning in their lives), recently outlined some psychological reasons for the decline in birth rates. He noted that “the dominant messages and trends within a culture greatly inform the goals individuals select in their efforts to build meaningful lives.”

For decades, according to a dominant narrative, having children has been seen, at best, as a neutral consumption choice that offers no particular value to the world and, at worst, as an irresponsible action that contributes to overpopulation, resource depletion, climate change, and other problems. A few years ago, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle even received an award from the group Population Matters to celebrate their choice to have no more than two children. Many people are convinced that having children is a net negative for society, like committing a crime, rather than a net positive, like becoming a doctor or engaging in other highly valued work.

The writer Stephanie Murray, in her recent opinion piece “Are We Willing to Admit That We Need Parents?,” observes that many parents “are desperate for some recognition that the work they are undertaking is valuable, not just for themselves or their children, but for the world.” Routledge similarly suggests that parents and families, popular culture influencers, and educators and scholars can “counteract prevailing cultural narratives” around the value of parenthood.

Many thinkers are doing just that. For example, the book Superabundance provides a much-needed corrective to the misleading narrative that population growth always leads to resource scarcity. The authors’ research shows that a population with more free people contributes to innovation and, ultimately, more abundance — debunking the notion that children are inherently bad for the world.

Private actors voluntarily driving a cultural shift toward greater social recognition of the value of children is one thing. Sadly, history chronicles many darker solutions that have been enacted in the name of raising or lowering birth rates. “Those of us who want to reverse falling fertility while preserving the values of a liberal society have a tricky task ahead,” Murray notes, eloquently. “We’ve got to hold two truths at once: that no one ought to be coerced into parenthood, and that we will all suffer if no one raises kids.… I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that would hesitate to admit that we need doctors. And yet, most of us agree no one should be coerced into medical school.”

Russia’s pro-natal propaganda campaign, which has included the revival of the Soviet-era “Mother Heroine” award for women who have ten children, sends chills down the spine, for good reason. While that policy is not coercive in and of itself, governments that make forays into fertility policy have all too often ended up resorting to coercive measures. Past government attempts to alter fertility rates have sometimes resulted in horrific human rights abuses. It is wise to be wary of the government treading anywhere near such personal decisions. Fortunately, there are several options that policymakers can pursue that both increase individual liberty and support families.

Pakaluk recommends that policymakers worried about falling birth rates expand religious liberty, particularly with respect to educational choice. Religiosity is strongly correlated with wanting a larger family and having more children. Recall that Pakaluk found that highly educated women choosing to have five or more children are almost always religious, be they Jews, Baptists, Evangelicals, Catholics, or Latter-day Saints. Their beliefs are a major factor driving them to place a high value on children.

Pakaluk has said in regard to sub-replacement birth rates, “I don’t think there is a social or political ‘fix’ other than whatever can persuade women and households to see children as worth the incredible personal sacrifices.” Of course, lessening the required sacrifices could also have an effect. The tangled web of government policies that needlessly complicate family life is vast. There are many simple, freedom-enhancing reforms with broad appeal that could lower families’ cost of housing, food, child care, and more.

But we must remember that in the cost-benefit calculus of family-size decisions, cost isn’t everything. The value that people associate with children remains an under-explored factor.