The pandemic may not have brought on as much of a baby bust as predicted, but it's not about to prompt a baby boom either.
Birth rates and fertility rates have been steadily declining for the past eight years. Today, people of childbearing age, many of whom are millennials, are delaying having children — or not having them at all. It's a trend that's bringing the US in line with the rest of the world as high-income countries, and increasingly middle-income ones, have long seen women delaying their first child until later ages compared to American women.
Since 1950, the worldwide fertility rate dropped from an average of 4.7 children to 2.4 children. Fertility rates in the US peaked in 2007, before declining in 2008 during the Great Recession and accelerating its slump when the pandemic hit. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report last year found that the US birth rate fell by 4% from 2019 to 2020, the sharpest single-year decline in almost 50 years, and the lowest number of births since 1979.
Various factors explain this, from increased contraception to fear of bringing a child into a world with a changing climate. Chief among them is an expensive economy riddled by a pandemic and that lacks affordable childcare, coinciding with decades of progress for professional women as choosing to be child-free becomes less of a taboo.
Here are five reasons why millennials are having fewer babies.