When we first started digging through the breathtaking data behind thisglobal population shift, the thing that kept hitting us was how personal it felt.
We’re both parents — Sarah has two sons, Brian one — so we knew without doing any research about the joys and pressures that come with the decision to parent. Like so many people these days, we decided to keep our families relatively small.
What we found when we started reporting, talking to experts and spending time with individuals and couples thinking through these decisions is that we are part of a trend that seems to be accelerating.
Ayman Oghanna for NPR
In the 1970s, women worldwide were having five children on average. These days, two is more typical and in many countries, including the U.S., it’s now totally normal for people to opt out of parenthood altogether. In some cases, researchers – and the people we’ve met – told us young adults who want children see too many obstacles in their way to make that choice a reality.
It turns out this private, intimate choice — How many kids should we have? — has awesome power. Researchers we talked to say smaller families are changing everything from the way global capitalism works to the education system to the sustainability of pensions.
There are some big challenges that come with this new normal. In the U.S. and many other countries, too few children are being born to maintain a stable population. In China, birthrates have plunged so low, the number of working-age people will drop by more than 200 million people by 2050.
Our reporters traveled to places in China, Greece and the U.S.that are turning into ghost towns, in part because so few children are being born. Experts told us many countries will have to develop new ways to care for a surging population of elderly, with fewer and fewer young workers to support them.
Changes like these have sparked fear and anger. Social media is full of crazy ideas and conspiracy theories about why families are getting smaller so fast. That’s one reason we thought it was important for NPR to take on this story, bringing more facts to an important conversation.
One of the discoveries we made is that this trend toward smaller families is actually being driven largely by a positive development: Young women and men have more freedom and opportunity these days to make decisions about their lives. Sometimes that means being parents, sometimes it doesn’t.
Along the way, we heard interesting ideas about how countries and communities might help more people who want to have more kids. We also heard from those who simply want to be left alone to make their own deeply personal decisions. Most economists and demographers told us they think this population shift is likely permanent, with cultural attitudes around parenting and families changing for good.
Maybe our biggest takeaway? We were reminded again of the power of families. These are the choices and the people that shape our lives most deeply. When lots of us choose to do family differently — having fewer kids, or no kids at all — it literally changes the world.
Read stories from the special series, “Population Shift: How smaller families are changing the world” here.
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In today’s episode of The Sunday Story from Up First: A discussion of why so many families around the world are making the choice to have fewer kids, and what exactly it means for our future.
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