Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, I was sent a graph about birth rates that sent me down memory lane to the day 15 years ago when my husband and I got married.
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Apparently, we aren’t supposed to worry about birth rate declines in younger women because the trend shows they are making up for it in their later years. However, the graph The New York Times shared doesn’t even begin to tell the full story.
At first glance, the graph suggests that declines in American birth rates among younger women are offset by older women having more children, supporting the idea of a temporary postponement of motherhood, with a full catch-up as these women age.
Paul Novosad, founder of Development Data Lab, called the NYT graph a “felony-level chart crime” because it created a misleading visual impression of balance and recovery. When he replotted the data to show changes in the actual number of births by age group (rather than percentage changes in rates), the supposed recovery is nowhere to be found.
Since 2007, the number of U.S. births to women aged 15–19 has dropped by about 320,000. Births to women aged 20–24 have declined by around 552,000, and births to women aged 25–29 have fallen by roughly 326,000.
According to the NYT, this decline is nothing to worry about because older women are having more children and will make up for it in the end. Except they don’t. In fact, the gains in older age groups are far too small to offset the losses.
For women aged 30–34, the change has been near zero or only modestly positive. Women aged 35–39 saw a gain of roughly 80,000 births. Those aged 40–44 had an increase of about 37,000 births, while women aged 45–54 had an increase of just over 6,000.
Overall, there is a gap of more than one million births between the declines seen in the 15–29 age groups and the modest gains in the 30–54 age groups.
Lower birth rates among women in their 20s and early 30s in recent generations are only partially compensated for later in life. This is leading to the obvious effect that we see in our communities. An entire generation of women is experiencing drastically smaller family sizes than their older cohorts. This is not a temporary shift but emblematic of a massive societal problem.
It is impossible to overstate how devastating the plummeting birth rates among American women truly are. For decades, the narrative in media and policy circles has been that the decline is simply postponing motherhood and not permanent. Even now, the NYT is trying to sell the same old drivel in hopes that women don’t wake up to the fact that our society has led them down the path to a sadder life.
There is a deeper cultural hollowing-out that can’t be seen on the graph. Families are the backbone of a healthy society. When young Americans delay or forgo having children, communities become less cohesive simply because they are no longer passing down the values and traditions that connected generations. Why would a childless adult volunteer at the local Little League concession stand if they don’t have children? These types of civic engagement that held neighborhoods together are eroding because adults have fewer stakes in the future.
A society that treats children as optional lifestyle accessories rather than the central purpose of adult life has lost its way.
The most common excuses I see among my friends who have chosen to delay building a family are the cultural shifts driven by modern feminism (budding corporate careers) and relentless economic pressures that make family formation feel impossible.
Blaming this on the feminist girl boss is probably the easiest way to make sense of this phenomenon. Popular culture celebrated this archetype while portraying early marriage and childbearing as traps that would derail ambition. But it was really more than that. Not only were you told that you would sacrifice your career for children, but it was framed as giving up on your life.
I remember being asked snarky questions on whether I actually wanted to finish college or if being a mom was more important because it was easier than succeeding in the corporate world. They asked me in a way that made it clear that motherhood was the option that only losers chose.
Growing up, there was a lot of propaganda placed on my generation against teen pregnancies. As a mother of four daughters, I think it’s pretty obvious that I wouldn’t want any of my daughters to be pregnant at 15. However, the effects of telling millions of young girls that getting pregnant would be the worst thing that could happen to their lives can clearly be seen in Novosad’s graph above. It takes a serious amount of deprogramming to break free from that thinking.
The result was a generation of young women internalizing the message that their 20s must be devoted to building their resumes. Changing diapers was for the women who had nothing to offer. Birth control and abortion provided the path to enforce this delay, but the cultural script supplied the motivation.
The economic fallout of this messaging is now swallowing my generation alive, and it’s not slowing down for younger women. It’s become the norm for households to rely on two incomes because wages stagnated while the cost of having a family has skyrocketed. Every generation has dealt with inflation, recessions, or depressions. But ours has been seemingly never-ending.
Families are forced to rely on both parents working in order to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Home prices and childcare costs, coupled with the rising cost of living, create the perfect trap. Having children now feels like a luxury. Whereas, for the countless generations before us, having children was simply seen as a natural progression of life.
And we can sneer at them and blame feminism or their coffee orders, but that does nothing to help. In fact, it turns them off from ever wanting to pursue a traditional family.
If we ever want to reverse this trend, it’s incredibly important that we stop pretending that postponing children is costless. We need to teach young women that motherhood is a noble and honorable life path. It doesn’t prevent you from reaching your potential, but is in fact the greatest thing you can do in life. And our political policies should be focused on uplifting the family.
I got married at 22, much younger than most of my friends, but on trend for my family. My husband and I had four girls before either of us turned 30. We received a lot of backlash for our decision to settle down. But looking back now, even through the hard times and everything I know about life, it was the best decision we have ever made.
We feel like the lucky ones. Our lives were blessed exponentially with each child that came into our family. Nothing about having children prevented our worldly success. It’s made us more driven and focused. We value community and legacy, and we strive to pass down our traditions to our children.
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