How to Actually Increase the Birth Rate
It’s as much a cultural issue as a political one
There’s been a lot of discussion about declining birth rates lately. The fertility rate in the United States reached a historic low last year, according to the CDC, and Elon Musk, our unelected president and father of 14, has said that population collapse is the greatest threat to modern civilization. In response to this looming crisis, the Trump administration came up with some stellar solutions, including a $5,000 baby bonus check (this barely covers the cost of the hospital bill for delivering a baby in the United States, even with insurance), and giving more Fullbright scholarships to families. Meanwhile, we are the only developed country with no federal paid parental leave policy, we spend less on childcare as a % of GDP than any of our peers, and we continue to let hundreds of uninsured mothers and mothers-to-be die of preventable causes every year because doctors refuse to see them.
Healthcare, parental leave, and affordable childcare should be table stakes for a country as rich as ours, but would it be enough to change the declining birth rate? The data suggests that yes, these things do make some difference (looking at data in the same country before and after a policy is implemented often shows incremental positive shifts in birth rates following introduction such policies, with subsidized childcare showing the largest positive effect) but even countries with excellent paid leave, subsidized child care and public healthcare still have birth rates that are below replacement levels. South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.78 children per woman (well below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population) despite billions of government dollars spent on pro-family policy, like paid leave and childcare (although there is some evidence that the rate is now rising again). Meanwhile Sweden, a country whose policies make American mothers drool, has a 1.52 fertility rate, still well below replacement levels, and below the American level of 1.66 (as of 2022).
So while it appears that family-friendly government policies do indeed make some difference in birth rates (especially when comparing before-and-after data in the same country), it’s clearly not always sufficient to convince people to have more children. Meanwhile, developing countries whose policies pale in comparison to places like Sweden continue to boast high fertility rates. Why?
Mostly, countries with high birth and fertility rates are not ones we want to emulate: Chad, Somalia, the DRC, Niger. The high rates are driven largely by limited access to contraception and religious taboos around using it, lower levels of female education and lack of professional opportunities for women, teen marriage and pregnancy, and high child mortality rates.
But, having lived for over a year in Burkina Faso, a country that boasts a fertility rate of 4.66 children per woman, I also think there are some positive reasons for why women in poorer countries choose to have so many children.
Now, it’s worth noting that even Burkina Faso, a country whose GDP per capita is literally less than 1% of that in the US, still has a federal paid leave policy of 14 weeks for mothers, a program that provides free healthcare services for women and children under five (despite ongoing struggles with infrastructure and coverage), and some basic subsidized child care programs. So despite its relative poverty, they are doing better than we are when it comes to basic services for families.
Still, it’s a far cry from what Sweden offers, which leads me to believe the difference is primarily driven by culture, not policy, and while we owe it to families to provide them with the basic services they need to thrive (the research does strongly suggest that pro-family policies like leave and childcare do improve parental happiness and well-being of a society), what we actually need if we want birth rates to rise again is a major culture shift.
Here are three major differences I observed while living in Burkina Faso that made me feel it had a more family-friendly culture than most Western countries (please note that I lived there in 2012 before the political turmoil that has characterized the country in recent years):
Alloparenting and communal care of children is still alive and well
Most people in Burkina Faso still live in extended networks of family and kin. In the rural villages, the way of life is not so different from those in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. People live in small homes organized around a central meeting place. Most of life is lived outdoors and communally. People’s homes are porous and neighbors and friends move between houses the way we might move between rooms in our own homes. Young children often prefer to stay close to their mothers, but it’s not at all rare to see a young child scooped up and cared for by an aunt, grandma, or cousin. Older children play together in the open spaces around the village, where traffic is rarely a concern.
Even in Ouagadougou, the capital, family homes are large and fluid. It’s not at all uncommon to have three generations living under one roof. People are constantly visiting one another, caring for one another’s children, lending a hand. In every neighborhood, there will be a gaggle of children in the street, streaked with mud, the young ones wearing only a tee-shirt (many families never bother with diapers), playing with a ball or found objects.
There is also a pervasive unspoken understanding that children are fine on their own. No parent in Burkina Faso would ever shame another parent for allowing their child to play unsupervised. Someone is always watching–a neighbor, a relative, or an older child–but mostly kids are left to their own devices and parents are free to get their work done, to rest, or to socialize.
Child-rearing is fully integrated with every other aspect of life: work life, social life, and leisure activities
I don’t think many of us realize how segregated families are in Western culture and how punishing this is for parents’ quality of life. I certainly didn’t realize it until seeing how different it could be in other cultures. Now, I see it everywhere.
In most parts of the US (especially upper and middle class communities), after you have a child, you are suddenly excluded from most of the pleasurable activities you enjoyed before your child arrived. Social third spaces–like restaurants, bars, and cafes–where a lot of adult social life unfolds in the United States, are overtly hostile towards children. Even private events, like weddings or parties, will often explicitly state that these are adult-only events. Outdoor, nature-based activities are also limited by the safety rules of our litigious society. For instance, I’ve always wanted to take my kids out paddling around the lagoon by our home, but you can’t rent a paddle board or kayak with children under age 7.
As a result, adults are forced into hanging out in kid-centric spaces and doing kid-centric activities. We wait in line to let our children ride the ponies at the fair. We spend obscene amounts of money on tickets for the bouncy castle and then overpriced pizza or ice cream from the stand next to it. We push our children on swings at the park for hours and hours until our eyes glaze over with boredom.
What’s fascinating is that if you go to places like this (playgrounds, activity centers, fairs) you will not see a single person without children (because they are objectively shitty places for adults to hang out) and if you go to places where adults without children typically like to hang out (bars, cafes, restaurants, shops) you will rarely see a child. We have, in the wealthier corners of Western society, achieved near-perfect segregation of the childless from the child-ed.
In Burkina Faso, this is not the case. There are no playgrounds. There are no kid-centric activity centers or fairs (because no one would pay for them). On the other hand, there is virtually no place where children are not welcome. Children come with their parents to open-air bars on the weekends and play with peers while the adults dance and drink beer. Children attend parties and weddings and add to the festive atmosphere. Children help their parents run errands at the market or pick up essential items at the corner store. Families of 5 will all pile onto one bicycle or motorcycle, or into the back of a taxi, and no one harasses them about safety.
Even work is integrated with childcare. My job when I lived in Ouagadougou was to set up a micro-savings service for women who worked in the outdoor market, thus allowing them to save for their children’s health and education. These mothers worked long hours selling their goods in the hot sun and almost all of them had a child with them. Did it bother people that there were children at the market? Of course not. Did it bother the children that their mothers were working and unable to entertain them? Of course not.
Mothers and children are valued
One fascinating thing about Western culture is that we have set things up such that having children is an economic disadvantage. Because we have made most professions incompatible with child-rearing and then let the free market determine the price of childcare, American families take an enormous financial hit when they choose to have children. But if you choose not to have children, you still benefit from the same social security and retirement benefits as those who do (which is paid for by the labor of the children you did not have or pay to raise). Therefore, the financially responsible decision–if you want to maximise your personal quality of life–is to forgo having children. And this matters a lot in a late-stage capitalist society where most people are barely making ends meet.
Moreover, cultural values reflect economic values. Stephanie Murray has written about this in detail for The Atlantic. We tend to attach value, esteem, prestige and power to a person based on their economic contribution. You might not like investment bankers and tech product managers, but our society certainly associates those positions with prestige and value. On the other hand, there is nothing more degrading than the thinly-disguised condescension you encounter in the Western hemisphere when forced to admit that your profession is just “mom.”
In countries like Burkina Faso, where there is no government-guaranteed social security for the majority of citizens, having children is still a family’s social safety net. Because of this, the work of bearing and raising children is key to a family’s survival, and because of its economic importance, the work is valued. In my experience, motherhood in Burkina Faso was more associated with power and prestige than anything I have seen in America.
What it would take for me to have another child
I am not about to pack up and move back to Burkina Faso, despite its child-friendly culture. For one thing, the country has been experiencing quite a lot of political violence in recent years. For another, although the vast majority of Burkinabe people I met were welcoming and warm-hearted, I hated living in a country where my accent, habits and skin-color were akin to wearing a sandwich-board sign with the words “I’m rich” written on it that made me a target for crime and harassment.
But I do think we could learn a thing or two from Burkina Faso when it comes to how we encourage higher fertility rates.
What we really need, in my opinion, is a combination of Swedish pro-family policy and Burkinabe pro-family culture. If we could pull that off (unlikely to happen in the next five years), I would absolutely have a third child.
Here’s what it would look like:
Access to affordable healthcare.
No one wants to have to choose between bleeding out in the parking lot and forking over their life savings should something go wrong during pregnancy or birth. This is just basic human rights stuff.
Access to in-home help or affordable, quality childcare
No one wants to have to put their precious baby in an understaffed, underfunded daycare owned by a private equity operation. But mothers do need help, even if they don’t work full-time outside the home. We need subsidies for in-home help, tax breaks, or high-quality care centers with flexible hours. And for kids 3 and up, we need free public preschool that covers the full workday.
Shareable parental leave and flexible return-to-work options
Interestingly, paid leave has not been shown to increase fertility rates as much as subsidized childcare, and I am not surprised. I am actually not a huge advocate of long, paid maternity leave. I know many women want this, but I think it sets us up for high levels of gender inequity in childcare and work norms.
Rather, I believe many women want more flexibility in how they integrate their economic work and their care work. We want flexible return-to-work and remote-work options (or the option to bring a baby on-site to the job on occasion). We want more understanding and accommodation for sick days, for days after bad nights, and for breastfeeding.
As for leave, I believe most of us would prefer a shareable leave program like they have in Sweden (where leave can be divided between mothers, fathers, grandparents and other trusted friends and relatives) so that the burden doesn’t fall so heavily on the mother.
I don’t want to play with my children
Here’s where we get into the cultural nuances of child-rearing that can be hard to influence through policy.
One thing no one really prepared me for in parenthood was how children, even after they are old enough to do many things for themselves and require less active 24-7 care, will still suck up every spare minute of your time because they require your constant attention. My girl is better at playing independently, but my son simply cannot. We have gone through long stretches without reliable childcare and it is virtually impossible for me to get anything done when he is in the house with me (unless he is sleeping or watching TV). Trust me, I have tried to train him, but I believe it’s just an inherent characteristic of his personality. He is super social. He needs someone to play with him.
On the other hand, when we occasionally go on family trips with friends and stay together in a big house, and my son has age-equivalent (or older) playmates, he leaves me alone. This kind of social play used to be an inherent feature of childhood. You didn’t have to schlep off to a playground. You could find it any day, any time, right in your backyard.
And its absence is making parenthood crushingly difficult.
I swear, if I have to play one more imaginary game of transformers, I will melt into a puddle of goo. This was never meant to be my job, and if I can’t easily outsource it to other more willing children, I simply won’t have another baby. I have driven around the country looking for places where this culture of independent outdoor play is still alive and well, and mostly failed to find it. Somehow, in the space of just a few generations, we have managed to kill the culture of outdoor free play in America.
I’m honestly not sure how best to bring it back, but it’s table stakes for me in the decision of whether or not to have another kid - and I believe that, even though many are not even conscious of how much it’s absence impacts them, it’s also what most other mothers want.
I want more adult-centric, kid-friendly third spaces
I don’t ever want to pay to take my children to a bouncy castle ever again. I want a bar with live music and dancing where kids of all ages are welcome. I want a restaurant that faces an open green space where my kids can wrestle in the mud with other kids while I enjoy a three-course meal. I want a cafe across from the playground with good coffee and wifi where I can set up and research and write while my kids play with other kids on the play structures (and I want other parents to trust that my kids know their own abilities, that children can work out arguments on their own, and please stop giving me the evil eye for my negligence).
Most non-Western countries have this in abundance. Why can’t we bring it back in the West?
Final thoughts
You may think I am asking for too much, but with the exception of modern healthcare, I am just asking for what all mothers had for the vast majority of our evolutionary history as a species: alloparental care, flexible work, free-range multi-age playgroups, and a full social life that does not exclude parents and children.
Many of these things still exist in less developed countries around the world and compensate in many ways for the lack of policy. It’s shameful that a country as wealthy as ours cannot offer mothers the same basic benefits that a country as poor as Burkina Faso can.
On the other hand, policy is not enough. We need a major cultural shift in the way we value and accommodate parents and children. Until then, I think we can safely expect birth rates to continue their steady decline.
I’m a practicing Catholic and have always believed the problem is cultural. If you are Catholic and in a parish that has a lot of young families, you have access to a huge reserve of support. Priests give homilies about how important parenthood is and they value mothers. Grandmothers invite you into their homes so they can babysit and give you a break. The other young Moms in my parish have embraced us so much and bring meals to each other when someone is sick or postpartum. It’s changed my whole perspective on parenthood.
What all these policy and cultural proposals are attempting to do is mimic the close family structure and tight-knit community in these more primitive societies. I don't believe you can achieve the same organic outcomes of higher birth rate with engineered child-friendly spaces and policies as most places that have tried them have failed to yield much improvement.
The one thing missing in all of this is the trust and character/skill knowledge of others in your community that comes from living day in/day out among your extended family members and those of your closest neighbors. It's one thing to let the community of children, which consists of brothers, sisters, cousins and close neighbors entertain one another in close proximity of the adults doing adult things, and another thing entirely to entrust your child to a random group of other children and random unknown adults in close proximity whose background and character you cannot possibly know well enough to be able to relax or focus enough on any work in front of you.
The home in which there are children being raised is just as much a full-time job in need of a manager and various entrusted supervisors as any job in the workplace. What a network of mothers who are extended family, family friends and neighbors used to be able to provide for each other while caring for children and managing households is mostly gone from our culture. By demonizing the full-time work of child care and home management as slavery and oppression instead upholding it as necessary and valued work that benefits society, we have lost those cultural anchors that provided the playmates, childcare and household help that used to exist. Somehow caring for your own children at home was oppressive but holding a job in which you provide childcare for other working mothers is liberating.
What policy and engineered cultural proposals are attempting to fix is the question of "What do we do with the children and home management so both parents can work or because both parents have to work?" Maybe what we should be asking is, how can we better recognize, value and compensate, the actual necessary in-home work of home management and child raising. We're all in if subsidizing childcare happens away from the home or involves paying a stranger to come into the home to help (and sometimes that may be necessary) but we somehow can't fathom subsidizing the work of the stay-at-home parent, who is raising future workers and tax-payers, or perhaps subsidizing pay for grandparents, aunts, uncles, sister, brothers, cousins or very close friends to do the child care and house care tasks in our own homes.
I've been a stay-at-home parent for 25 years, It was lonely and the task was enormous because the neighborhood was empty during the day. There were no other trusted eyes but mine to supervise the kids outdoors nor were there any other children around for my girls to socialize with. I ended up shouldering more work by providing childcare for working moms not only to help with our income but so there was another child or two for my children to play with. How I longed for a neighborhood like the one I grew up in where the mom's talked over the back yard fence and who were able to provide babysitting for each other. I had a whole gaggle of friends and my siblings to run around the neighborhood with. We can't recreate these close knit communities by outsourcing more childcare and play areas in adult spaces outside the home. We have to start making home a source of socialization and valued work again.