Raising birthrates really does take a village

Mention the low and falling birthrate, and you’re bound to get a hundred bad responses.The two most common explanations are that young people are too selfish and lazy, or that having children is too unaffordable.Those who blame unaffordability for the Baby Bust don’t have a lot of data on their side, but they do have a lot of solutions, mostly universal daycare. These responses are both errors. When you pin the Baby Bust on selfishness, you cast family formation as an individualistic undertaking. When you propose universal child care as the solution, you make it into a governmental matter.Both views are wrong.Raising kids is not something that parents can do on their own. Parents need support and always have, but the proper source of support for most parents is not the government. It’s the community: Extended family, friends, neighborhood, church, and school.New research confirms this: People are much more likely to get married and have kids if their family and friends support them and are happy about their kids. Government support, meanwhile, does very little to prod people to have more children.The new findings corroborate and elucidate old findings about peer support and about the “contagion” of birthrates, both high and low. The findings also point towards the root cause of our Baby Bust: A hyper-individualistic culture where extended family is derided, organized religion is struggling, and community institutions are withering away.(Getty Images) New findings Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies and BYU’s Wheatley Institute conducted one of the largest ever studies on what drives people’s decisions to have children, have more children, or have no children.Specifically, the authors knew that culture determines birthrate, and they wanted to get to the bottom of that. Politicians and most journalists offer purely materialistic and economic explanations for birthrates, but these explanations do not withstand scrutiny: Birthrate changes do not correlate very well with the economy (Americans had many more babies during and right after the financial crisis than in 2019), with household incomes (all five income quintiles have the same low and falling birthrates), or with the generosity of government benefits.Culture, then, is what is left to explain why some groups and some times and some places have higher or lower birthrates. But culture can be a hopelessly vague term. Attributing any phenomena to culture can sound like giving up on an explanation. The researchers, Lyman Stone, Peter Brookes, and Jason Carroll, say culture can be a “black box” explanation, meaning the mechanism is totally invisible.So Stone and colleagues tested some possible mechanisms by which culture affects the birthrate.They started with a survey of nearly 10,000 adults worldwide, and found that one of the biggest predictors of having more babies was receiving support from friends and family. “Across cultures, perceptions of peer support for childbearing matter a great deal,” the authors concluded.Cultures where new parents are more likely to expect help from their own parents — such as the United States and Israel —have higher actual birthrates, and the people there intend to have more babies than in cultures (such as Japan) where there’s less expected grandparent help.Here’s an even stronger correlation the authors found: People have more babies in cultures where friends are expected to be happy for expectant parents.The authors put it this way: “When people feel supported by friends, they desire, intend to have, and actually have more children. Likewise, when people feel encouraged to have children by their parents, they also desire and intend to have more children. Believing one’s friends would celebrate a new baby is associated with a 10% increase in desired number of children and a 20% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another child, while parental encouragement to have children is associated with an 11% increase in desired number of children and a 30% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another one.”Also, adults who grew up in larger families tend to want more children (and end up having more children).These findings reaffirm what prior studies had found: Real, human-level support is what drives people to want more kids and have more kids.Pregnancy is contagious “Most people that I know in our age group have three or four,” Ava, a Jewish mother in Maryland, told me. “And then there’s another group, and they all have five, and they’re all friends with each other, and five is a great number. Five is just what they do.”Ava lives in Kemp Mill, a neighborhood anchored by two orthodox synagogues. Because the congregants at these synagogues do not drive on the sabbath, Kemp Mill is absolutely packed with Modern Orthodox Jewish families. And they have a lot of babies.“There is an element of contagiousness,” admitted Yair Treister, a young dad in the same neighborhood.Pregnancy is not literally contagious, but the questions Stone and colleagues probed point to how it can seem so. If your friends have kids and want kids, and if your extended family is pro-family, then you are more likely to have children. You could imagine a hundred reasons for this.New parents’ social lives are often built around their kids: 4 p.m. backyard get-togethers are after nap time, and can easily end by bedtime. Nobody is having four-hour Sunday brunches at a restaurant if they have toddlers.Also, getting support from friends and extended family in raising your own kids makes you feel like family-formation is a grand joint undertaking. It’s something difficult and important that you’re doing together with others. Past research has found this, too.“Do Grandparents Really Matter?” was the title of a study published in the European Sociological Review in 2024. The author, Roberta Rutigliano, found “a strong and positive effect of regular grandparental childcare on women’s likelihood of having a second birth.”In other words, if your parents helped you raise your first child, you were more likely to have a second. Rutigliano, though, cast this conclusion in more neutral economic terms: “These results highlight the importance of the affordability and the availability of childcare for the decision to have a second child and the need for more supportive childcare policies.”The assumption implied there is that grandparents can be replaced by formal, government-funded childcare. The evidence suggests otherwise.The IFS/Wheatley study also asked respondents if they received meaningful government support for raising their family. The results showed no correlation between government support and ideal or intended family size, and a very slight positive correlation with actual family size.Last decade, economist Angela Luci-­Greulich and demographer Olivier Thévenon reported similar findings. They found that government subsidies for child care had no effect on birthrates, and that the availability of childcare had a very small effect on birthrates that mostly amounted to parents having children earlier, not parents having more children.Bowling Alone The data in the IFS/Wheatley study helps explain why some cultures have more kids than others, and it also helps explain why the whole world is having fewer and fewer kids: We are less connected to community and family.Robert Putnam’s 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone laid out how Americans belong to fewer things, go to church less, know their neighbors less, and engage with their community less.OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE, OUR 60-YEAR MISTAKEThis alienation has many costs, but the most important is probably the reduction in family formation. Without supportive friends, family, and congregations, Americans perceive (correctly) that raising kids is very hard and expensive. Governments attempt to replace community and family with funding and child care, but the results are unimpressive.Nothing actually can replace the support of true community and tight-knit families, especially when it comes to an undertaking as grand as raising kids.