Lyman Stone on America’s falling birth rate
I always knew I wanted to have children. And because all my jokes are terrible and I genuinely enjoy chatting about the weather, it just felt kinda predestined. Everybody I know knew I wanted kids. I put it in my online dating profiles (do not recommend if you are trying to land a date). As I changed jobs and locations in my twenties, becoming a dad was the only immutable part of the vision I had for the future.
In late 2023, my dream came true: My wife gave birth to our daughter. She’s funny and exhausting and wonderful.
I expected to love being a dad, and I do! I also expected my friends and younger family to become parents at around the same time. That has not proven true. Most of my friends are not parents yet. Some are considering trying. Others never want to.
It’s not just my community: The birth rate has been falling rapidly in the United States. In 2005, “births per woman” (a wonky metric that measures how many kids the average woman has) was just over 2. Now it’s about 1.6.
And this is not an American phenomenon. The birth rate is declining across the world, from Germany to Japan to India. Many countries have tried to convince their citizens to have more babies. Those efforts have largely failed.
But now there is a growing movement in the US that thinks it can buck the trend. They call themselves pronatalists. The group is ideologically mixed, but its loudest champions (see: Elon Musk and JD Vance) are conservative.
Lyman Stone is one of the better-known pronatalist academics. Stone is a demographer and director of the........
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