The push for an American baby boom

The Trump Administration wants more Americans to have babies. It's proposing a $5,000 "baby bonus," among other policies. Would this fix the nation's historically low birth rate?

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, sociologist at the University of North Carolina and the director of the Carolina Population Center. A mother of two kids.

Melissa Kearney, professor of economics and the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. A mother of three kids.

Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen, professor in epidemiology and Biodemography, University of Southern Denmark.

Alexis Watts, an Oklahoma City woman opting out of having kids with her husband.

Part I

DEBORAH BECKER:  Today we want to introduce you to On Point listener Alexis Watts, who with her husband, is grappling with one of the most personal and profound decisions a couple can make.

ALEXIS WATTS: There's times where I'll see a kid on a movie and I'll say, oh, he's so cute. And my husband will turn to me, and he'll say no. So he's pretty for sure on that. It's a lot easier for him to say no. For me, I feel like it's a mix of hormones, but then I think about having to change diapers and it's not really a fun chore to do.

BECKER: After two and a half years together, they recently got married. Alexis just turned 29. She's a nurse in Oklahoma City. Her husband works at Starbucks while studying for a psychology degree, some relatives are starting to ask if it's time.

WATTS: So his mom really wants us to have kids and just saying, oh, you're gonna want a baby. And there have been times, maybe I would want one, but it always comes down to the fact that, no, we are pretty good where we're at.

BECKER: Alexis says she was always wary about having kids. Her mom raised her alone, so she saw how financially tough parenting can be. She's worried they can't afford children.

WATTS: I have many friends that have had kids, and I've just seen how they have to juggle the cost of food, childcare, school, maintain a job, and it's difficult to be like a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home father.

It's very difficult to maintain that and be financially well off.

BECKER: And it's not just money. Alexis says it's also feeling uncertain about the world right now.

WATTS: So from my husband's parents, they have asked me, what happens when you get old and someone needs to take care of you? You're not going to have kids to take care of you.

And I responded to my husband's mom saying, I don't want to put that burden on my future child expecting somebody to take care of me.

BECKER: Stories like Alexis's are not uncommon and the issues she's dealing with are getting political attention. The birth rate in the U.S. has reached near historic lows and the Trump administration wants to turn that around.

President Trump says he wants a baby boom and at a March for Life speech in January, vice President JD Vance simply said he wants to see more babies born in the U.S.

JD VANCE: We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages. One that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.

BECKER: The White House reportedly is considering several policies to try to persuade more women to have children, including offering so-called baby bonuses, payments to women after the birth of a child. This hour we're looking at the declining U.S. birth rate and what it means for all of us. Joining us is Karen Benjamin Guzzo.

She's a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and director of the Carolina Population Center. Thanks for being with us.

KAREN BENJAMIN GUZZO: Yeah, happy to be here.

BECKER: Also with us, Melissa Kearney, a professor of Economics and the director of the Aspen Economics Strategy Group. Melissa, welcome to On Point.

MELISSA KEARNEY: Thanks for having me.

BECKER: So let's start with you, Melissa. What is this, the birth rate right now, we hear it's been declining since I think 2007 or so. So we're gonna talk about some of the reasons why, some of the policies in just a few minutes. But let's start with the rate and what is the trend right now?

KEARNEY: As you mentioned, birth rates in the U.S. have been falling since 2007. They've been falling around the globe, in particular, in high income countries for longer than that. The reason why I think this is finally getting a lot of attention in the U.S. is because right now the total fertility rate, which is, think of it as an approximation of the number of children a woman in the U.S. might be expected to have over her childbearing years. That's down below 1.7, which is a historic low for the U.S.

And the fact that it's that far below 2 raises a lot of issues because it means we are pretty far from naturally reproducing our population. So it's that number, the below 1.7 that has really gotten a lot of attention.

BECKER: And that's the replacement level, is that what you're talking about? Can you explain that a little bit?

KEARNEY: Yeah, it's a little bit complicated because the replacement level in general, think of it around 2, a little bit more than 2.

Every woman in a society basically has to have, on average, about two kids over her lifetime for the population to maintain its size without immigration. And so it's really the consistent sustained decrease in birth rates year after year, results in it looking like women are not going to hit replacement rate in the U.S. over the course of their lifetime or their childbearing years.

Again, this is something that we're seeing not just in the U.S. but really in all high-income countries now.

BECKER: And so what's the implication here? So fewer babies. Why? Why do we, should we care?

KEARNEY: Sure. Hopefully we'll dig into this in some detail. But let me just briefly say, the reason why this matters is, first, immediately, if we have a shrinking number of children, that immediately affects things like towns with schools. Some schools are going to close, et cetera, a little bit more long term, you just have fewer people entering the workforce, and so the workforce in the U.S. very soon will start to shrink. Because as I've said, we've been having fewer babies born each year since 2007.

A declining workforce in size matters, because it means that we're producing fewer things. But even more importantly, the evidence suggests that a smaller or an older workforce is less dynamic, is less innovative. And so economists worry that this might simply lead to lower living standards for all, if we're just a less dynamic, innovative economy.

And then a third thing I'll point out is if you have fewer workers per old people in a society that puts a lot of fiscal pressures on our social security system, on our Medicare system. Again, Europe is already seeing this. In order to maintain the social insurance systems that high income countries have set up, where generally workers pay taxes, that then pay benefits to the retirees and elderly. That whole system breaks down when you've got more old people than workers and so we need to rethink all of those sort of social insurance systems as well.

BECKER: At the same time, we're hearing AI is taking a lot of jobs, fewer people in the workforce may not be the worst thing. And perhaps there should be other ways of looking at social safety nets. Does it have to be an increase in birth rates to help out with these things, and couldn't there be more creative ways to look at it?

KEARNEY: Sure, if the main issue we're concerned about is we can't afford Social Security and Medicare anymore, that's an easy policy problem.

It seems to be an impossible political problem, but it's an easy policy problem. We can redesign those programs. If the main concern is our workforce is simply going to be less dynamic, then it puts the focus on, then how do we improve productivity per worker? And it could be AI, it could be investments in technology, it could be really doubling down on increasing the skills on the smaller workforce, of all of the workers that we have.

It just puts the focus on productivity. We should absolutely be doing those things. I think a different issue is if we want to be a society that is growing, that's not shrinking. If we don't wanna be, let's say, South Korea, where their total fertility rate is now far below one.

Projections are that country is just really, it's on the path to decline, to extinction, really, if you wanna go further out, if we wanna be a society that's growing, then I think it makes sense to think about, Why are people not having the number of children they say they'd like to have? Are there things we could do to bolster the birth rate?

Not so we're talking women are having four or five kids like they did a long time ago, but just the way U.S. women did in the '80s and '90s. So I think it's a useful conversation to have. Even if we think we don't really need people to do so many jobs anymore, we can rely on technology.

BECKER: Karen Benjamin Guzzo, I'd like to bring you into the conversation and what do you think about this historically low birth rate at this time, and what are the implications in your mind? Do you agree with Melissa?

GUZZO: I think I agree in the broad strokes with Melissa because, to me, the biggest concern is people still say they want to have kids.

They're open to having kids, but they've got all these barriers in place that feel, they feel like they can't do that. So they are making these decisions not to have a kid right now over and over again. And then you get to the end of your childbearing years, and there you are, potentially with no children, when you would've liked to have had children or you have smaller, a smaller family than you would've liked.

And so I find that to be pretty concerning, because to me, that's a symptom of where have we gone wrong? That people feel like they can't pursue the family goals that they have. In terms of some of the more macro aspects of concern. I would say, again, I would probably agree with you, Deborah, in that there are other things we can do.

And Melissa brought this up as well, that we could make policy changes in terms of how do we fund our social insurance programs for old age, for instance. And that there are other ways our labor market and productivity could change. So those motivate me less to worry about this, my larger concern really is, where did we go wrong?

That people still say they're open to having kids and are interested in having kids, but just don't see that it's feasible for them.

BECKER: And my question is, it wasn't all that long ago when we said there were too many people, that people should have fewer children. I understand that you look at statistics and you try to draw from those, but it seems like a big shift here.

What happened?

GUZZO: Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. So you go back to the 1970s and we're talking about the population bomb, and we're saying no, there are too many children being born. We're worried about population size. We need women to have fewer kids. And now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we're saying there are too few kids, women aren't having enough.

And so we need them to increase the number of children they're having or more women have children, and it is ironic that we're seeing this sort of pendulum shift, but, to me, the underlying thing is, what we're always trying to do is figure out how do we micromanage women's reproductive labor.

Why are the birth rates the only lever we have to address some of these issues that go along with changes in population structure. And I would also argue that not only did we have this sort of big pendulum shift about too many kids overall in the world and birth rates that were too high.

But even in the United States, we were very worried about certain types of births, birth to teens and to women in their early twenties. Because they were unintended. So we were telling some people not to have births, even in the United States.

Part II

TRUMP: And we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. How does that sound?  

BECKER: These baby bonuses involve paying about $5,000 to new parents. Many On Point listeners weighed in on whether that would convince them to start or enlarge their families.

REBECCA: $A 5,000 baby bonus is not helpful and is kind of a slap in the face to be honest.
LYNN: $5,000 is nothing. It’s no money.

TYLER: I don’t think $5,000 matters in the grand scheme of everything else that’s going on.

SHANNON: It does nothing to defer the cost of raising kids in a way that is going to support them to become productive and sustainable adults.

EMILY: It costs around $18,000 to have a baby in the hospital without insurance and with insurance it’s still nearly $3,000.

SARA: The cost of childcare is insufferable. It’s debilitating for a lot of families.

ELIZABETH: We are living at a lower standard than my parents did when we were being raised.

BECKER: Those were On Point listeners, Rebecca in Oregon. Lynn in Ohio. Tyler in Colorado. Shannon in Wisconsin. Emily in Kansas. Sarah in Wisconsin and Elizabeth from Minnesota, so a wide range of listeners weighing in on the Trump administration's plan for a baby bonus to try to encourage people to have more children.

We're talking about this today with University of North Carolina, sociologist Karen Benjamin Guzzo, and Economics Professor Melissa Kearney. And I'm wondering, Karen, what do you think? About this idea of a baby bonus, a $5,000 bonus. And what do you think about the reaction? We got a lot of reaction from On Point listeners about this $5,000.

What do you think?

GUZZO: Yes, people are absolutely right. They know this. $5,000 doesn't cover anything. Even as one of the listeners said, even with insurance, you're paying out of pocket, $2,500, $3,000 to have a baby. So $5,000 is really just a drop in the bucket. It's estimated to cost about $300,000 to raise a kid from zero to age 18.

And then you have to pay for college, if that's what your children do. Having said that, I think it would be great to give families money. I am all for giving families money. It would help a little bit, because most people take an income hit, especially women, take an income hit when they give birth and have a new baby.

And it would help out a little bit, but it's not going to budge the birth rates. You would have to have a very strange calculus going on in your head to think, oh, I can afford to have a baby and raise a child to adulthood with $5,000.

BECKER: So is there a magic number? If it was more money, would that be better?

Or what do we know about offering money or financial incentives to parents or to couples to try to encourage parenthood? Does it help or not?

GUZZO: It helps a little bit. But it would need to be more reliable. And I think that's one of the problems that we have in the United States, which is whatever political party is in office is going to revoke what the other political party just did.

And so having kids and raising kids is a long-term commitment, obviously. And so this idea that you might get a child tax credit under this administration and it might disappear under the next administration, or you might get money now, but you wouldn't get it again if there's a different presidential party, a political party in office.

So having more money would help, but it would need to be more sustainable. It would need to come in the way of child tax credits ideally that are available to everyone, regardless of whether they meet an income threshold. So some of the stuff I've heard too about the baby bonus is that it would not necessarily be available to everybody.

Not everyone would be eligible. You'd have to make a certain amount of money to file taxes, or you would need to be married. Or you would get a different amount based on your marital status. And again, having more money, what the listeners had said in some of the other clips is that having more money would help, but it needs to be consistent, and it would need to be fairly sizable.

And for most people, it's not going to entice them to have kids they wouldn't otherwise have. It might entice them to have kids a little bit sooner.

BECKER: We've heard some other suggestions. There reportedly are several other proposals, maybe lowering the cost of in vitro fertilization or making it more accessible.

Perhaps one idea also is changing, reserving Fulbright fellowships for applicants who are married or have children, a national medal for motherhood for women who have more than six kids. Some varied proposals that apparently are being talked about in the White House.

Is there an idea that we've seen more effective than others, or what do you think of some of these ideas?

GUZZO: Melissa, you can go ahead and weigh in if you'd like.

KEARNEY: Oh, sure.

Thanks. I wanna, I agree entirely with what Karen said about the $5,000 baby bonus. But I wanna add the point that the public conversation and reaction to that was a little bit silly and really I think makes the point that we need to get the politics out of this issue.

So I couldn't believe how many Democrats pounced on the idea of a $5,000 baby bonus as being offensive, a slap in the face. We heard from your NPR listeners, you know they don't, this idea from Trump is a terrible idea. Let's be clear, two years ago, a lot of the same people were very frustrated that the Republicans wouldn't agree to an expanded child tax credit, which would've given parents an additional $2,000 a year.

So the fact that we now have Republicans saying, actually, we agree in principle, families with kids need more money. Let's give that. We should take that. We should be delighted when there's bipartisan recognition that having kids in this country is expensive and we're now having a proposal coming from a Republican White House to send people $5,000 at the time of a baby's birth.

As Karen said, parents take a hit when they have kids. We see an earnings drop in particular for mothers, and of course we see expenses rise. If we want to be a pro-family society, if we want to have society share in the cost of raising kids, then this is a great idea and a lot of other countries do it.

Now, where I then agree is this is a great idea, but it's not enough. And so I agree entirely with Karen. This is not going to increase the birth rate in a meaningful way, but it will share some of the burden that parents face. And for some people who are on the margin, can I afford to have a second kid or a third kid?

This might make a difference for that small group, but then we should build on this and do something like a more sustained child tax credit through the 18 years of a child's life.

BECKER: The $300,000 number, I was shocked by, not including college.

GUZZO: Yes. Yes. It's a lot of funny, and it think people are vaguely aware of that.

And then I think what often happens is you have your first kid and you're shocked by, oh my goodness, this is a big deal and it's going to cost so much, and how will I do all these things? So I think there's the decision to have kids and there's the decision about how many more to have or how far apart to have additional children.

BECKER: I read something from an economist from Massachusetts and the suggestion is that actually the bigger issue is the cost of time that parenting requires, which is not free, and then becomes more expensive in developing economies. And this economist says that all citizens in the United States have a stake in what happens here, because everyone's earnings gets paid to social security, paid to public debt.

And there are many people who are enjoying those benefits of the work of all children. And maybe they didn't raise children themselves. So everyone has an interest here in what happens. What would you say to that, Melissa?

KEARNEY: I think this is right. The focus on costs. I understand it, but it's not that all of a sudden in 2007 raising kids in the United States got a lot more expensive.

So it's really not that all of a sudden, prices went up or incomes fell. One of your listeners said, we are in worse position than our parents. In terms of actually wages right now, income compared to our parents' generation, it's just not true. I think the reason, what we see in the evidence, in the studies, is it really is more about this lifetime trade off of what it means to be a parent and all of the other things I might do with my adult time.

So I think what's much more relevant than specific annual costs associated with having kids, is that now, as compared to our parents' generation or even women in their childbearing years in the now as compared to in the '80s.

Almost all women work. And so the very real tension of combining work with parenting, that is a real tension that is related to the cost of childcare, but it's also just, how do I get to work every day and still raise kids at home? And that's a real tension that we haven't resolved.

It's also the case that parenting now, as compared to the way our parents raised us back in the '70s and '80s. Parenting is much more intensive. So you've got more women working, you've got parenting being much more demanding in a social norm sense, of what we expect of parents, what parents want to, and expect to be able to do with their kids.

And so it's really this trade off of building a life that kids fit into and also doing all the other things that are work and also leisure opportunities, that again, have become, have proliferated more. In some sense, adults have more choices and socially acceptable choices about how to spend their adult time and money than previous generations.

And so my read of what's happening across high income countries is that the way people are resolving that conflict looks like shifting priorities. Centering parenthood as part of your adult life just isn't as prominent as it once was. And so that reflects both social norms, institutional norms, expectations about work and parenting, and all of these things that are really much bigger than just the annual cost of, let's say, childcare.

BECKER: Right. These are big things that you're talking about in terms of how do you get to work every day and the expectations of parents to be so involved in raising their children, much more than folks were certainly a generation ago.

So it's a lot easier to say, here's $5,000 than to try to deal with sort of the cultural things in the workplace and then the expectations of what parents should be doing at the moment. But I wonder, so if there aren't easy or easier potential solutions to this, could disempowering women become a strategy?

Right? In certain ways, because then wouldn't have to worry so much about those tensions in the workplace and those ideas of the lifetime trade off here because of career aspirations. And there could be more of a focus on intensive parenting. Is that a worry? What would you say to that?

Karen Guzzo, you first?

GUZZO: Yes, I do worry about the movement that seems to be happening to disempower women. So we've seen the rollback of reproductive rights after the Dobbs decision. There are efforts to reclassify certain types of contraception as causing abortions. There are efforts to make it harder to get telemedicine and medication abortion.

And these are about pulling women back and trying to get them to reprioritize and limit their roles. In terms of outside of the labor or outside of the family, I don't think you can actually put the genie in the bottle. What we've seen since Dobbs fell, that made abortion harder to access, is that abortion rates have actually risen.

And so people do feel motivated not to have children. We are seeing people increasingly using long-acting reversible contraceptions, because they do really want to be able to control when they have kids. Women go to college at higher rates than men do. They complete college at higher rates than men do.

So I don't think there's an easy test to disempower women. But I do believe there are these efforts to do, and I find that extremely concerning.

BECKER: Melissa, you wanted to add to that?

KEARNEY: Yeah. I actually think this is, you know, why the conversation gets so heated so quickly. There have been a number of essays written, weekly, it seems, in major newspapers that have the tenor of, stop blaming women for this issue. Economists need new models. Women don't want to have kids anymore. Stop blaming women, and I understand that reaction.

If the worry is, oh my goodness, as soon as we talk about the fact that birth rates are down and the population is aging and not growing as fast. It sounds like people are going to run to this Handmaid's Tale view of the world where women are forced to have kids. I'm less worried about that. I think that does raise the importance of having this conversation and getting ahead of this issue and understanding what's behind it.

Because let's agree, that none of us, I'm going to assert that none of us in this conversation, but I think, the overwhelming majority are not looking for a society that's autocratic and restricts women's rights to work or to choose, when and if they want to have children.

I think the bigger issue is, as Karen alluded to at the beginning, we're actually not seeing in surveys in the U.S. or around the world that women are saying, I don't want to have children anymore. There's a little bit of a drop in what people say, in terms of ideal family size or their intentions, but there's also a pretty big gap between what people say.

And again, in a lot of high-income countries, you're still seeing women and men say that in their ideal, having about two kids is ideal. And so I think this is less about how do we convince women who don't want to have kids to have kids? And more about, again, what Karen said at the beginning, why do so many people have fewer children than they say they would like to have?

At this point in the U.S., half of 30-year-old women are childless, half. Two decades ago, in my generation, it was only 30% of women. And then those of us born in the '70s, by the end of our childbearing years, childless rates were 10%. The young adults right now who are in their thirties, they are on track to have a much higher share of childlessness at age 44.

And I think the question, is that actually what people want or are there things we could do in society so that people could have children that they say they want to have, that they might like to have. And by the way, that would be really good for society more generally. So it's not about convincing people who don't want to have kids or forcing people who don't want to have kids to have kids.

It's empowering women who want to have kids to feel like that's an accessible choice.

BECKER: I did see a recent study, I think it was Ohio State, right? But U.S. women, 50% of the women who did say that they do in fact want children, said, but if I don't follow through, it's not the end of the world. So they do want children, but they're not so committed to it that they're going to make sure that it happens.

Because there are a lot of other issues going on here that may change their minds, that may make it even harder for them, so they're not committing to a family at the moment. We're gonna talk about some of the reasons for that, and we're also gonna look at some other countries, social safety nets, and why birth rates there may or may not be increasing despite the fact that there is money being provided by the government to increase the birth rate.

Part III

TAMARA: My husband and I just had our first baby last summer and at this point it may be our only baby.

TIM: It doesn’t really make financial sense to have two or three or four kids when you can barely afford to get one through daycare.

GRACE: The childcare. Preschools and daycares when they’re babies are just another mortgage payment.

HYACINTH: We don’t have health insurance right now. There’s nothing that helps us with that.

TAMARA: The way that my job is I don’t get maternity leave. So when we had him last summer, I just didn’t get paid for the time I was out.

AMANDA: The thing that would’ve made a really big difference for me in starting earlier so I could have a second child. Would’ve been support for child care.

JESSIE: Make education affordable and free.

ANNA: I think that having national health care, paid maternity and paternity leave. Programs that Europeans have in general are things that would actually incentivize at least me to have children.

BECKER: Those were On Point listeners Tamara in North Carolina. Tim in South Dakota. Grace in Oregon. Hyacinth in Colorado. Amanda in Washington. Jessie in New Mexico and Anna in Wisconsin.

They all say, better government programs would help new parents or help people become parents. And we want to just take up one of those issues. The one Anna just mentioned, social programs for parents in Europe.

RUNE LINDAHL-JACOBSEN: Yeah. In Denmark we have full salary paid by the government during paternity and maternity leave.

So that will be one year approximately when you have a child.

BECKER: Yep. You heard that right. One year. Fully paid salary. And that's according to Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen. He's a professor of epidemiology and demography at the University of Southern Denmark. And that's not all. He says daycare in Denmark, subsidized and parents get a monthly tax-free payment to help raise their child until that kid turns 18. Despite all this, Denmark, too, has declining birth rates.

LINDAHL-JACOBSEN: We are actually closing daycares. We are closing schools in rural areas we have a depopulation. They are bleeding population.

BECKER: As a population, Denmark now has fewer than 1.5 babies born per women in their lifetime.

That's down from about 1.9 in 2008, the lowest level in Denmark since the late '80s. Lindahl-Jacobsen says the Danish government has tried to reverse the trend in a few ways, making fertility treatments more easily available, and a viral, quote, 'Do it for Denmark' ad campaign, encouraging couples to go on romantic vacations.

None of this though has worked.

LINDAHL-JACOBSEN: The reason that we have this decline in Denmark is because people do not get first child. So it's childlessness, and that across all ages in Denmark. So something's going on, and it has been so since 2008 and this doesn't seem to be economy. So it has to be something else.

BECKER: I'm here with University of North Carolina, sociologist Karen Benjamin Guzzo and Economics Professor Melissa Kearney. Melissa, as we hear about what's going on in the U.S. and the Trump administration push for a baby boom, and then you hear Denmark, which has all of these programs to help parents, and yet people are not having kids.

I know you've said that this is the big question on your mind. What's going on here that is making people refrain from having families? What do you think?

KEARNEY: The Scandinavian case is a great counterpoint to claims that the problem in the U.S. is that we don't have publicly provided daycare, et cetera. If you look at Scandinavia, they have all of these things and their fertility rate is lower than ours.

What I think about that's really interesting is, as I've said, it's not that all of a sudden daycare became more expensive in the U.S. in 2007, women in the U.S. were having more children throughout the '90s, early 2000s.

But I think it raises an interesting possibility, which is that women in the U.S., despite how hard it is, we've never had a Scandinavian style safety net in the U.S. and yet U.S. women had more children than in Scandinavia for many decades.

If we did have those kinds of supports here, would you see fertility rates in the U.S. return to the rates slightly above 2 that we had in the '90s, early 2000s. It's an experiment we've never tried. It's a lot more expensive. It takes a lot more of a societal commitment to say, okay, we are actually going to give a child allowance every year your child is, through age 18, we are going to have publicly provided daycare. We are going to have paid maternity leave.

I don't think it's impossible that what we would see is if you take U.S. historic preferences, recent historic preferences in the U.S. for larger families and you added a Scandinavian style social safety net, would our birth rate bounce back up? Maybe, if we're really committed to bolstering the birth rate. I think that's the kind of policy conversation we need to have.

Again, much more than a $5,000 baby bonus. Having said that, the fact that even in these other countries we're seeing people decide to have fewer children, we're seeing people stay childless through their twenties and early thirties, which just makes it much harder to have children, or multiple children.

Does raise the very clear point that it seems to be about more than just direct child costs. And again, in my view, my read of the evidence, it's about shifting priorities, people making different choices to spend their twenties and thirties investing in their careers, spending more time on leisure than being eager to start a family. So I think we have to take that seriously too and put all of those pieces together.

BECKER: And Karen Guzzo, what do you think about this? What do you think about the fact that we are hearing from these Scandinavian countries that have these strong social programs to help new parents and to make sure that there is paternity leave and subsidized childcare?

That we're not seeing more people get into parenthood, if you will.

GUZZO: Yes. So I think I would agree with Melissa in that we have actually never tried that in the United States and the fact that we, for whatever reasons, have tended to be a little more pro-family than other countries. It's perhaps because we have a more religious country than our peer nations.

If we had a robust childcare system and paid leave, they might actually budge birth rates a little bit. I don't know if they would get us all the way up to 2.1, but they might get us from, we're at around 1.6 right now. Get us up to 1.8 maybe. But that would be at the aggregate level, lots of babies.

So that would be, make a difference. So what I would say though is that even if we invested in those programs and they didn't boost birth rates, they tend to make the population healthier and more productive. So leave programs actually encourage women to return to the labor force when the leave is over, so they don't leave the labor force, they return to where they used to work before, they return to full-time employment more often.

And so our labor force would remain more robust. Robust childcare is a great way to get kids situated for a productive life. We know that when we have programs like Head Start. In Head Start, for instance, which is a program for low-income families, that the returns of investing on those are pretty good.

So these would help our future economies by making our labor force healthier and more productive moving forward. So I think those would be important to do, even if they don't necessarily budge birth rates, because they would help offset some of the other concerns we might have about the impacts of low birth rates.

BECKER: We should say Head Start, which of course is being cut at the same time that there's this call by the government. Which at the same time the government's calling for a baby boom. But go ahead. I didn't mean to --

GUZZO: No, yeah, sure. Sure. So the other thing I would say is I would maybe push back just a little bit on the shifting priorities. Because I think what young people are saying, they're talking about the uncertainty of the future, but they're also talking about the stakes of parenting. So not just impacts for their own life, but given that social mobility is down, and you don't have to read the Wall Street Journal, or Raj Chetty to know this, social mobility is down, economic mobility is down.

And it feels down even further than it is, as Melissa was pointing out, that some of the aggregate indicators say, actually no. These generations are doing okay, but it feels like it's down. And so people are investing in things like intensive parenting because they're like, what would I have to do to raise a kid to be successful in this world, in this society?

So I don't think it's just a matter of people deciding that they need to be doing intensive parenting or something like that, but it's really a reaction to looking around them and being like, Wow, it's so hard to get into college. It's so hard to get a good career. It's so hard to find a job that pays enough money.

So they're making these really, I think, rational decisions about not only how would having a child impact my finances. But would I have what it takes economically and socially and all these other things, to raise kids who would ultimately be successful? And if I can't do that, maybe I shouldn't.

BECKER: Is that really though any different from other generations? Don't most generations want the next generation to do better than they did? Don't they want their kids to have more economic opportunities? So what's the difference?

GUZZO: We're at a point now where it's not a given that every generation will do better than the ones before it.

That has changed. And it does seem like the stakes are higher, but I don't think my grandparents' generation was particularly worried about what my parents would do and how well they would fare. So I think they just said, I'll just do my part and raise the kids, and they'll go to school and there'll be jobs.

And so I think people are very worried about how uncertain the future looks right now. Will these entire industries go away? Will we have climate change? What will happen in the future? So I think there's just there's a lot of murkiness when people look forward and having a child is really this 18, 25, 30-year commitment in some instances.

KEARNEY: This is really interesting. I think this relates to marriage too. There's this, you hear young people say things like, everything needs to be perfect. They have to have their job all lined up. They have to have all this certainty resolved before they commit to, we see this in what they say about marriage as a capstone event and then having kids. I think that is different, right? Our parents didn't think, oh my goodness, I have to have a nest egg so I could pay for private tuition for my kid to go to college, and each of my kids should have their own bedroom, and I need to be able to afford all of these lessons before I have kids.

I'm not blaming young people for that. I do think there's something different about social norms. People used to have kids with economic uncertainty. People had kids when they had a lot less money than people do now.

BECKER: Did you, do you have kids?

KEARNEY: Do I have? I have three kids and, yeah, my first I had, right when I finished grad school, I had no idea how I was going to fit in having a kid with the tenure track.

We barely had any money. We both just came off grad school. We were, we had a high, in a permanent income way. I don't think we were worried that we wouldn't be able to afford the child, but I might have said, gosh, I have to wait until I have tenure, or we have good salaries before we have kids.

That's what you hear a lot of young people saying now. I think that feels like a shift and it's also, this is beyond my expertise as an economist, but as a mom, I think we've done young people a disservice by making the cost of parenting, we talk about them all the time.

Economists do a great job highlighting the fact that you will, women, your earnings will be down, you will experience probably a 20% drop in your lifetime earnings and obnoxiously economists refer it to the child penalty as if our kids are penalizing us by leading us to choose to work less or less intensively or take higher paid jobs on the side.

We don't talk about what Yale philosopher refers to as the transformative experience of having kids. So in my economist framework, when you think about the costs and benefits, the costs are very obvious. It sounds even silly once you have a kid to refer to it as a benefit, but the transformative experience of having a child and what that does to your life is not something that we do a good job even articulating.

And so I'm not convinced that, I think we haven't done a good job basically telling young people, you, maybe you don't have to have everything in order to start on the life plan that you, yourself say you probably want to pursue.

BECKER: I'm a mother of three. I see the same exact thing. They want everything in order before they even start thinking about a family, Karen, we're doing a little unofficial survey here. You're a mother of two.

GUZZO: Yes.

BECKER: And where are you, when your kids, in terms of looking at, yeah, becoming a grandmother, maybe?

GUZZO: Both. So I have an 18-year-old and a 21-year-old. Both my kids say they'd like to have kids someday, but that's like a distant horizon thing. But I had my first child when I finished grad school, I was doing a postdoc. My husband was in a residency, worked all the time.

We had no money. But what I would say is different is that we knew what our trajectory looked like. We knew it would continue and it would only go up from there. And so what I worry about that we are facing is that we're going to have the sort of childbearing and family haves and have nots.

That people who are more advantaged might delay having, getting married and having kids, but they probably will. And because their life is predictable, they know it will eventually happen for them, and they will probably be able to find a partner who also has a good job. But for people who are less advantaged in our economy, in our society.

So those without a college degree or those living in a rural area, in a low, have lower paying jobs, including some that need a college degree, being a teacher or being a social worker, jobs that don't pay particularly well, it's hard for them to look to the future and say, yep, I'm going to be doing well 10 years from now so I can go ahead and get started.

And so I worry a lot about who gets to fulfill their family goals.

And we are seeing a reversal of that education and childbearing relationship in many countries.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.