When the Baby Boom Went Bust

After a long, slow slide that began in the era of petticoats and suffragettes, the American fertility rate recently reached a new nadir. In 2023 U.S. moms birthed 3.6 million babies—about 76,000 fewer than the year before and one of the lowest totals since 1979.

It was a low-water mark that hinted at a bigger sea change. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, between 2018 and 2023 the share of adults under 50 who have no children and say they are unlikely to ever do so rose from 37 to (what else?) 47 percent. Fertility is falling in “basically every county: rich and poor, rural and urban,” says University of Chicago historian Peggy Heffington ’09, who studies contemporary and historical motherhood and reproduction. In 1970, the American fertility rate was about 2.5, above the replacement rate of 2. Today, it sits around 1.6.

Academics and parents themselves agree: this is a remarkably arduous moment to raise a child in the United States. But women opting not to have children is nothing new. In her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, Heffington traces the history of non-motherhood from ancient Roman women who used lemons as ad-hoc diaphragms, through abstinent medieval nuns, and all the way to the present. “It felt important to me as a historian to establish that there is significant evidence of women limiting fertility for a very long time,” she says. “As long as people have been trying to have babies, they have been trying not to have babies.”

Still, many factors make parenting feel particularly difficult in 2025, including economic struggles, gender inequities, climate anxiety, mental health concerns and shifting expectations of community support. These accumulating challenges have been central to an increasingly common choice for young people of parenting age: not to parent at all.

Factor 1: Money talks

More than one-third of respondents to the 2024 Pew survey cited money concerns as a major reason for deciding against parenthood. The financial landscape for young people is tough, to say the least: a 2016 study from the Center for Household Financial Stability found that median millennial savings were 34 percent below what historic trends would predict; in a recent survey by the financial platform Step, more than one-third of Gen Z respondents reported running out of money every month.

Among the many costs of raising a new human, child care has emerged as especially exorbitant. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, American families pay upward of one-sixth of their median income on care for just one child—as much or more than what most pay for rent or mortgage. As tech entrepreneur Shadiah Sigala ’06 puts it, “You can see how with two or three children the calculus becomes absolutely untenable.”

On top of the cost of child care is its availability: over half of Americans live in “child care deserts,” with low-income rural and communities of color disproportionately impacted. This issue inspired Sigala to found Kinside, which provides a marketplace connecting families to caregivers in their area, helps companies build child care into their employee benefits, and works with local governments to improve larger care ecosystems.

But more accessible child care doesn’t help those who struggle to get pregnant in the first place. Fertility issues afflict many aspiring mothers, and while technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have opened up many new possibilities, they don’t come cheap, with a single round of IVF costing some $20,000. Heffington argues that, for some, such technologies actually “increase the pain of infertility in offering a promise where previously there was nothing you could do.”

Factor 2: Balancing the load

As she discusses the current state of non-parenthood, Heffington cites a Pew survey statistic she finds telling: 45 percent of women said they wanted kids in the future, compared to 57 percent of men. “What we’re seeing is not that women like babies less than they did,” she says. “It’s that they’re very aware of who’s going to be doing the work, whose career is going to take the hit, and who will do the vast majority of mental labor.”

That dynamic is familiar to Karen Magoon Pearson ’05, who adopted four children with her husband. As a couple, they seek to be egalitarian in their sharing of household chores, and mostly succeed. But, like many mothers, Magoon Pearson has been tasked with nearly all the intangibles: keeping track of the kids’ schedules and school workloads, planning outings, problem-solving and managing the logistics of a six-person family. “Emotional labor, the mental load; the code hasn’t fully been cracked there, even when both people want it to be,” she says.

Sigala, who now has two children, has also struggled in that arena. She experienced deep postpartum depression after her first child, exacerbated by a lack of support from her then-husband. “Mothers are the nucleus and the electrons; they’re keeping everything together,” she says. “They’re called to be many, many elements in the atom. And they’re just breaking.”

Although the twin concepts of mental load and emotional labor have finally entered the collective conversation, Heffington argues that that awareness is not enough to counter the deeply ingrained expectations that befall mothers. “Women have become more aware of the effect [parenting] will have on their lives, their marriages, their careers,” Heffington says, “and are increasingly thinking that it’s not a good trade-off.”

Factor 3: A hostile climate

The changing climate has also had profound effects on people’s parenting proclivities. In the 2024 Pew study, one in four respondents said their choice to not have children was primarily for “environmental reasons,” while 38 percent cited a slightly broader “state of the world.” (Cue meme of “gesturing broadly at everything.”)

These choices are not evenly distributed among young people, notes Jade Sasser ’97, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside. Surveys by the Yale Center for Climate Communications consistently find that people of color experience more emotional distress—and suffer from more clinically diagnosable mental health issues—due to climate change. Their fertility decisions are also more likely to reflect that experience. In a 2020 survey, 41 percent of Latino respondents and 30 percent of Black respondents cited climate change as a factor in why they did not have children, compared to 21 percent of white respondents.

This trend was compelling enough to inspire Sasser to write a book about it. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question explores younger generations’ fear and grief around the climate emergency, the ways that people of color are disproportionately impacted, and the reproductive decisions that result.

One of Sasser’s more surprising findings was that young people are less fixated on the negative impacts their hypothetical children will have on the planet, than on the negative impacts the planet will have on their children. That is, in previous decades people who cited environmental factors in their fertility decisions were usually considering issues like overpopulation and pollution—how bringing a new human into the world would damage their surroundings. Now, the feeling is that the damage has been done, and the fears focus more on how the consequences will affect quality of life for a new generation.

Many people Sasser interviewed wanted children but felt that subjecting new humans to the potential horrors of climate change felt unethical. “If I had kids amidst a catastrophe like a hurricane, I would be worried every day,” one woman told Sasser. Would she be able to keep them safe?

Although climate anxiety and grief are common across race and socioeconomic strata, people of color experience them more strongly due to structural inequities, Sasser says. (In her book, she points to one potent example; a report analyzing FEMA records from 1999 to 2013, which found that 85 percent of post-disaster buyouts went to white families.) “Climate change seems to be a threat multiplier,” she explains, “meaning that the other reasons people have for either not wanting children or being ambivalent are compounded by emotional responses to climate change—and that’s worse for young people from marginalized communities.”

Factor 4: The parenting happiness gap

One hot take you won’t hear on Oprah: American parents seem to consistently report feeling less happy than people without children. (Specifically, 12.7 percent less happy, according to a 2016 meta-analysis of adults across 22 countries.) Heffington says that, in the U.S. at least, there is no kind of parent—new parents in the thick of it, empty nesters, step-parents—that is, on average, happier than people without children.

The so-called “happiness gap” is particularly acute for women, which Sigala and others attribute to the true emotional weight of motherhood and the opportunities young women give up by having children. Since full-time child care can often cost as much as a professional woman earns, Sigala says that women around her often feel the “pernicious, intractable” pressure to step away from work and care for their children or families. “You can see how it starts to pile up, and before you know it, women are hugely disadvantaged in their professional lives and their ability to have strength and freedom,” she says.

Still, data from Europe suggests that, while raising children is challenging everywhere, the kids themselves are not the problem. In a meta-analysis, researchers found that in countries such as France, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the gap disappears or is even reversed, with parents reporting that they are happier than non-parents by up to 8 percent. Their results showed that a few simple factors make this paradigm possible: vacation time, parental leave, sick leave, and affordable or free child care. “It doesn’t require massive infrastructure,” Heffington says. “Just dialing down some of the pressure American parents experience could make a huge difference.”

 

Factor 5: Losing the village

In writing her history of non-parenthood, Heffington found that she was actually writing a story about the transformation of the American home, a transition “from something deeply embedded in community structures offering support to the isolated nuclear family.” Although the familiar single-biological-unit structure might seem inevitable from our perspective, work from Pomona professor emerita Helena Wall shows that alternative configurations were flourishing in North America as recently as 400 years ago. “Colonial Americans understood the family only in context of community, with women from throughout a community taking active part in raising children,” Heffington explains. “They spent their whole lives passing in and out of each other’s houses.”

But during the 19th century, a major demographic shift found young people flocking from rural to urban areas for factory jobs—away from those support systems and toward the smaller, suburbanized nuclear family so typical today. Heffington sees today’s millennial experience as an extension of that shift. “We’ve replaced community support structures with ones you have to pay for, with relatively predictable results in terms of fertility,” she says.

Indeed, the loss of the proverbial “village” it once took to raise a child is significantly impacting younger generations’ parental reluctance. For example, while a network of relatives and neighbors watched over Sigala during her childhood, as a young adult she lived in a succession of different cities, each time starting anew and alone. “When my friends have grandparents around to take the kids, even one day per week, I’m very envious,” she says. And babysitting neighbors? As extinct as the dinos and the dodos.

Magoon Pearson also struggled with a lack of support after her oldest child’s academic troubles led her to homeschooling; not long after, the pandemic found her at home teaching all four children. “By the end of that year, I just couldn’t do it anymore,’” she remembers. Continued changes to parenting norms only intensified the difficulty. During her own childhood, she often spent time independently at friends’ houses or birthday parties. “It wasn’t like parents were expected to be everywhere all the time, doing everything their kids were doing,” she says. “Now, you kind of are, so you never get a break.”

Next steps: should we (population) panic?

Since President Trump started his second term, his administration has taken a staunchly pronatalist approach. Vice President JD Vance has spoken disdainfully of “childless cat ladies” while Trump touts $5,000 “baby bonuses” for mothers-to-be.

Sasser interprets it all as part of a larger, politics-driven “population panic”—and one that she treats with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Indeed, while Magoon Pearson feels some anxiety when she considers a future with fewer children—what will happen to Social Security? Will there be enough young people to keep the gears of society moving?—she rejects the idea that the childfree are inherently selfish, citing family and friends who instead spend their time on other meaningful endeavors. With four children’s lives to manage, and so many places where the world needs help or healing, “I’m bogged down with this anxiety that I’m not doing enough, stuck at home,” she says. “Thank goodness there’s people out there with the time and energy I don’t have!”

Sasser, Heffington and others argue that any supposed population crisis is at best overblown, and at worst manufactured. While some East Asian countries are indeed seeing small towns depopulating and villages with no children, the U.S. has “the privilege of being a place where people want to come to raise their families,” Heffington says.

Zooming out, the larger context is that fertility rates tend to reliably settle under 2 across time and cultures as women get more access to education, contraception and professional opportunities.

Heffington suggests that policymakers could look to the European countries with happier parents for a model of how to make parenting healthier. France and Sweden, for example, have built infrastructures conducive to parenting that include paid and extended maternity leave, prenatal care, free child health care and subsidized daycare. “If you’re forcing women to choose—whether it’s because of professional ambition or economic survival—some are going to choose not to have kids,” Heffington says. “If you make it easier for them to have both, they’re going to have both.”