I plan to return later to the broader debate about why birthrates surged so dramatically after World War II. For now, let me pause on the language we use when we say that fertility “rises” or “falls.” The metaphor suggests a physical motion—as if demographics were a pendulum or a tide. We know that isn’t literally true, and yet the image sticks in our minds. We start attributing to fertility something like velocity, momentum, even direction, as if it were a vector moving through time.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that what looks like “movement” is, in reality, a change in how people live their lives. A generation decides not to follow the pattern of the one before it. And that can happen for three reasons:
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Material barriers. Housing is expensive, the cost of living even more so, and many simply cannot afford the life their parents had.
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Cultural rejection. Young adults look at the previous generation and decide they want something different—something “better,” whatever that means to them. The judgment may be fair or delusional, but it shapes choices all the same.
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Psychological capacity. Some people are no longer equipped—emotionally, temperamentally—to carry the weight that earlier generations carried. Parenting is not just an economic decision; it is a matter of character, resilience, formation. And formation never stops. We are shaped by every interaction, every workplace, every algorithm that pushes us one way or another.
Most of the time, these forces blend together.
Where we think we see a straight-line decline—a continued “downward trend”—what we are really seeing is dissatisfaction passed from parents to children. One generation chooses smaller families to live “better” than their own parents. Their children grow up in those smaller families, feel a similar discontent, and go even smaller. There is nothing inevitable about this. It is not fate—it is mood, culture, and fashion inside each generation.
But one rule does hold over the long run: when parents find themselves worse off than the childless—financially, socially, emotionally—people will eventually stop having children. They do so until someone—government, church, community—changes the incentives, the conditions, the cost-benefit ratio of starting a family.