Analytics wrote:I would suggest that the low birth rate is caused by the following factors:
1- Birth control gives people a real choice.
I think that largely explains the drop in the birth rate since, say, 1950, but probably does not explain the significant drop since the Great Recession.
2- People are waking up to the idea that they can live their life the way they want and that not having 3+ kids is no longer an unthinkable taboo.
Ditto.
3- I read somewhere that while kids are great and all, people without out them tend to be happier. I bet more people are on to this and are recognizing what the opportunity cost of children actually is.
I read some research on this about 10 years ago. At the time, what researchers consistently found is that parents and non-parents are about equally as happy, but their happiness was spread over the course of their lives differently with parents having higher highs and lower lows over multi-year spans of time. There's a lot of quirks in that data. For example, younger parents tend to be unhappier and parents with more than two kids tend to be unhappier. It might be worth looking into what the research says these days.
4- Even if you want kids, they are expensive. I know one couple that is now finishing college and wants to have kids, but before they do they want to pay off student debt, travel, live abroad, purchase a nice house in a nice suburb, and then be financially secure enough to give their kids "the good life" which means plenty of extra money for expensive sports teams, summer camps, family vacations, perhaps a lake house, etc. Granted, most people probably have more modest and realistic goals for what they want to do before they start a family. But the fact remains that people see more options now, and the biological reality of waiting to have kids is fewer kids.
Yeah.