Will the Economic Downturn Lower Birth Rates?
January 8th, 2009 | Posted in Marriage/Family
by Carl Haub, senior demographer
There is a good bit of evidence that hard economic times cause people to delay having a child or not have one altogether, circumstantial as that evidence might be. In the United States, there were two notable 20th Century baby “busts,” one during the Great Depression that bottomed out at a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children per woman in 1936 and another during the inflationary “oil shock” decade of the 1970s when the TFR set an all-time low record of 1.7 that still stands. In Sweden, rather wild swings in the TFR seem to follow trends in employment and in Eastern Europe, the bottom fell out of the TFR as the breakup of the Soviet bloc destroyed economies.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics (click to view full size).
So, will it happen this time? In the 1970s, there were quite a few things going on which makes a direct connection between the economy and TFR decline a bit murky. The TFR had been dropping rapidly since the late 1960s, possibly connected with the feminist movement as women looked to careers beyond the traditional nurse, teacher, and secretary. And Roe vs. Wade, which confirmed the legality of abortion on demand, passed in a number of states in Jan., 1973. The Depression decline might seem more clear, but the TFR had been falling throughout the Roaring Twenties.
Perhaps the current period will provide a better laboratory. The TFR has been relatively steady at 2.0 to 2.1 for about a decade and there have been no major events such as Roe vs. Wade. Unemployment is rising and the airwaves flood our living rooms and cars with one bit of scary news after another. Bad news travels fast and furiously these days, much more so than in the 1970s and 1930s.
For more, see articles from The Chicago Tribune, American Public Media’s Marketplace, and the Psychology Today blog.
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February 23rd, 2009 at 7:25 am
Carl,
Fascinating stuff. Thanks. I am an analyst with Hitwise, an internet measurement service and came across your blog in doing research for my own blog.
Hitwise reports internet usage data including searches (i.e. queries typed into Google et al) and I checked our data as a leading indicator of birth rates and found that internet searches for “pregnancy” and “maternity clothes” are both down year over year.
That was when I came across your blog. You mention that the data on birth rates during the recession won’t be available for quite awhile. Not sure if our data will be of use to you, but I am preparing a blog post about fertility rates and internet searches and before I publish it I thought I’d reach out to you to see if you have any thoughts on something I uncovered.
Searches for maternity and pregnancy were falling before the recession started. Why? In a boom economy, wouldn’t irrational exuberance lead to higher birth rates? One theory is an ageing population.
Anything to add?
Thanks, Heather
November 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Hi Carl,
Very interesting statistics. Maybe the downturn in birth rates is indeed related to the cycles of boom and bust in quite a simple way. People have more sex when they’re happier, leading to more pregnancies. When people are worrying about money, as they will do in times of bust / recession, they’re much less likely to be in a better mood and therefore are less likely to have sex, leading to less pregnancies.
Simple eh?
Angie
December 8th, 2009 at 12:26 am
I to have noticed this decrease in fertility rates. Although I do see where people are coming from How to Conceive a Girl, I believe that people not having as many kids during the recession isn’t because they don’t have enough sex or that they aren’t as happy. I believe that it is because kids are expensive. Even if you have the healthiest baby ever you are still going to have to pay quite a bit of money to have and raise the kid. During the recession money is tight winch makes the need for it greater and the need to conserve it even greater.
February 20th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I think it is also worth noting that the highly educated young adults in the U.S. are marrying much later and having fewer, if any children. That is going to have an impact as well. Remember, this was the group that used to drive the private school system and endow ivy league universities (many of whom lost considerable wealth reserves in the recession).
Having children is seen as a major expense by most new couples. The cost of education has risen tremendously over the last 25 years and heavily influenced the decision to limit family size. In addition, the cost of medical care is a huge deterrent to creating large families. The social shifts which are causing members of families to scatter across the world for their jobs is another reason people are unwilling to have more than two children…they no longer have the family support system that could pitch in if there was an emergency.
April 20th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
I work for the County of Riverside, CA’s demographics department. I know this post was written over a year ago, so the data is out now for 2009 in our county and yes, the birth counts have declined quite a bit! When I divided the numbers by the total pop to get the crude birth rates, the cbr’s for 2008 and 2009 are a bit lower than 2006 and 2007. Riverside County is quite a large county in California (over 2 million in population) so I am comfortable comparing the cbr’s from recent years (there haven’t been any major age-structural changes recently).
For my research, I don’t really look into the answers to “why” but I can see some validity to all the answers offered on this thread. Maybe because Riverside County has experienced a great deal of foreclosures and unemployment, but I would have to research further to be sure. I just wanted to share with everyone that yes, the current data does confirm that lower birth rates are taking place during this economic downturn.
September 1st, 2010 at 8:26 pm
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