The Trump administration wants people to have more children. Here’s why people might be skipping parenthood and what could be done to change that.
Fulbright scholarships set aside for married people and parents. Programs to teach people about menstrual cycles and the best times to get pregnant. A $5,000 “baby bonus.”
These are some of the ideas floated by the Trump administration to motivate people to have more children as birth rates continue to decline. But some parents say this is not what they need for support.
What might help families instead are social safety nets to ease the cost of child rearing, according to Northeastern University experts.
“Choices around family planning are so personal,” said Kristen Lee, teaching professor of behavioral science at Northeastern. “Even the idea that people want to have children is very personal. But we also know that even if they do want that, there are many factors, especially cost, (that make people) hesitate to have children.”
Birth rates in the United States have been on a decline since 2007, with 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime, according to the latest statistics. Part of this is due to fewer teen pregnancies, said Mindy Marks, an associate professor of economics at Northeastern.
“The United States used to have one of the highest rates of teen fertility among all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries,” she said. “There was a lot of active public policy to decrease teen birth rates, things like better access to contraceptives. … Some of the decline is just people who would have had babies when they were 17 or 16 might now have babies in the future. … If everyone’s having babies later in life, our statistics aren’t good at capturing that.”
But data suggests women are not just having children later as they prioritize education or career but are skipping parenthood altogether.
There is a long list of reasons people might not have kids, Lee said, from concerns over the amount of time they’d need to invest in parenting to worries over the future of the planet thanks to climate change and global instability. Others might defer because they can’t afford to take time off work, either financially or professionally. Some simply don’t want children.
But for many interested in having children, cost is a huge factor that can limit their plans. Not only are basic needs like housing becoming increasingly expensive, but child care needed in the early years can cost thousands of dollars a year.
“There’s a lot of contributing factors that can cause reluctance,” Lee said. “There are a lot of challenges and a weak incentive, particularly when we don’t necessarily have the social safety nets in place. … It puts a tremendous burden on people.”
Raising a child from birth to age 18 in the United States can cost between $200,000 and $310,000, according to some sources. It is even pricier in some states, including Massachusetts, where families can spend up to $650,000.
Child care is a huge part of this: parents can expect to pay anywhere from $3,000 to $21,000 annually on child care.
Other countries have tried offering one-time financial incentives for having children like the proposed baby bonus, but this did not necessarily work to raise birth rates, said Linda Blum, a sociology professor at Northeastern.
Guaranteed paid parental leave across the country and more affordable, quality child care could instead ease these burdens, as seen elsewhere in the world.
“Some of the things we’ve seen well-documented as helpful to families’ well-being and security, financial and otherwise, is (what) our European counterparts (offer),” said Lee. “We think about access to early childhood care, education and paid parenting leave. I think we need to pay more attention to the well-documented evidence of what makes families flourish.”
For example, some Scandinavian nations experimented with “use it or lose it” paid paternity leave and found it helped families as it allowed parents to take time off to bond without losing out on pay, Blum said.
“We saw some really positive changes in those nations because you could, for example, alternate and have a much longer combination of paid leave if you had one parent taking paid leave and then the other,” she added. “That could be really helpful (here) because infants need more care and infant care is more expensive.”
Otherwise, many families are left trying to figure out how to live off one income if one parent stays home or weighing the cost of working with the cost of child care.
Paid paternity leave also helped fathers become more engaged parents. Marks said globally, many women still end up doing a lot of child rearing due to historic precedent. This might deter some from parenthood, especially if they have to face juggling a job and parenting.
“It’s hard to move gender norms,” Marks said. “In societies where economic growth for females happened … rapidly, gender norms didn’t have time to adjust.”
Additionally, many other nations have heavily subsidized or provide free child care once children hit preschool age, which can also help ease costs for parents.
“They just feel it’s good for the kids,” Blum said. “It’s good for the nation. We don’t think that. … We are an incredibly stingy society when it comes to supporting women and children and families, so that also makes it really hard. … Some states offer paid family leave but we haven’t learned from other wealthy democratic nations because they offer very generous paid family leave and their economies are not broken by it. It makes the decision of when to have a child so weighty. It’s a really tough choice for women.”