Generation Z’s Birth Dearth

The effective fertility rate globally has halved from an average of 5 births per woman to 2.5 since 1965, according to United Nations data. There are a plethora of drivers of this trend, some because of incontrovertible material advancements and others because of increasing anxieties and/or changing social expectations. Women’s empowerment with increased access to education and labor force participation, declining rates of child mortality, and the increasing costs of raising children are major drivers of declining fertility rates. Developing countries, particularly in Africa, are not seeing the same decline as modern industrialized societies.

In America, around 1 in 4 millennial and Generation Z adults who currently don’t have children say they plan to stay that way due to finances, and this financial causation has two aspects: One, valuing the financial freedom of not having children, and two, concerns about the ability to afford children. The first reflects changing attitudes toward child-rearing as a marker of integrated adult life, and the latter is a direct result of rising cost of living and anxieties over debt and global instability. There is a perception, and common trope, that the reason Generation Z and millennials are having fewer children is because of climate change, political polarization and other state-of-the-world concerns. While true for some, for many it is due to just the practical fact that increasing numbers of people simply do not want kids—even if they can afford them. So economic factors and socio-cultural factors both play a role in declining births across Western societies. 

Increasingly, some political, business, and cultural elites are sounding the alarm that the western birth dearth is going to cause catastrophe, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Musk has taken to warning that if the birth dearth is not turned around, it will lead to total civilization collapse. Personally, I do not believe that elite moral hectoring is going to move the needle on Generation Z’s desires or lack thereof to have children. Only a profound cultural change could begin to stem the tide. As a society, we need to fundamentally orient away from generational selfishness to a society where the political and cultural framing is oriented toward a forward-facing frame. 

The generation born in the aftermath of World War II, baby boomers, is the largest generation in modern American history—and they have clung to political, cultural and business power longer than any previous generation. This has resulted in them retaining virtually all of the nation’s wealth; the over-55 crowd controls over 70% of the wealth in America. And the main path that that generation took to begin their own wealth accumulation, is increasingly out of reach for Generation Z: home ownership. This, coupled with the fact that major social programs that cover baby boomers’ retirement, Social Security and Medicare, are a tax on the younger working classes—and said working classes have no confidence that the programs will be around to benefit themselves, leaves Generation Z adults less comfortable with the prospect of starting families than previous generations were. 

In short, Generation Z (born 1997-2012) lives have been marked by a post-9/11 security state, a subsequent two decades of warfare, a global recession, a global pandemic, and political instability. Both millennials and Generation Z have seen the decision that was promoted to them their whole lives as the path to success, gaining a college education, saddling them with seemingly insurmountable debt. And the political, cultural, and religious institutions of our society have refused to share power and leadership with younger generations as they have become adults. This problem extends to the Seventh-day Adventist Church as well, where the average denominational leader is a boomer as well. That means that Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z are all pushed back from leadership. Until Generation Z is able to see a society where opportunities to share power and opportunities seem plausible, there will remain structural barriers that make starting families a harder and harder task. 

The decision to have or not have children cannot be answered in the right or wrong category for any specific person by outside observers. But if society is worried about plummeting birth rates among younger generations, then maybe the best path forward is to have a society oriented toward communal responsibility, shared power and decision making, and stability. The good news is that Generation Z adults are not anti-family. Vice Media has reported that “73% [of Generation-Z] say that becoming a parent enhances who you already are as a person.” This shows an understanding of the importance of family, so maybe working together across generations to create a society safe for family formation ought to be our goal.