A few weeks ago, my wife and I welcomed our third child into the world. She is a little girl. We named her StellaMaris in honor of the Blessed Mother.
This was an unusual pregnancy. We are both 44. We also have two teenage children. We were five years away from the coveted “empty nest.” We both have relatively flexible, well-paying jobs. I am even employed by a university, which means that I do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition costs hanging over my head, if my children choose to go to college. We were on the cusp of vacations and brunches.
People who heard of our pregnancy and considered our age (and the ages of our two children) often ask me if the baby was the consequence of an “oops.” Although certainly a surprise, the pregnancy was quite intentional.
We made a conscious choice at 44 years old to have another child with teenagers in the house. This is surely quite strange. But, even ignoring our age and family structure, there is something fundamentally strange in 2024 about having a third child at all.
Fertility rates are crashing around the world. The rate in the United States has dropped to 1.6, the lowest in our history. This is far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman necessary to simply replace one’s population. The situation is much worse in other countries, like South Korea, where that number is down to 0.7. This has grave implications if you think the existence of South Korea is, on the whole, a good thing.
People disagree about whether we should be concerned about these rates. Many argue that fewer births is a net positive, especially those worried about global warming and resource depletion. Others argue that having collapsing fertility rates is catastrophic for modern welfare states.
While I tend to be on the “fertility decline bad” side, as a good personalist, I get squeamish with the idea of procreating for the sake of the economy or the Social Security system. However, at the very least, a basic function of a healthy society is to ensure its continued existence.
I am no expert on fertility rates, but I do read a lot about the subject. The most common explanation for the drop tends to mix economic and educational arguments: Birth rates are going down because we are getting richer and better educated. Basically, children are for lower-class people.
Taken at face value, this explanation works. Fertility is negatively correlated with women’s income and education. Likewise, as countries get richer and more educated, fertility rates go down.
But my favorite demographer of fertility, Lyman Stone, recently questioned this economics/education explanation. His research shows that the correlation between income, education, and fertility is not some immutable fact.
Standard analyses of income, education, and fertility do not consider pregnancy timing and instead focus too much on women’s earnings as opposed to family incomes. Stone points out the obvious fact that women tend to have kids when they are young, when earnings are at their nadir. Likewise, highly educated women with higher earning potential tend to delay pregnancies and generally do not have as many children later in life for various reasons (including simple biology).
In fact, Stone found that when you consider male earnings and overall family income, income is positively associated with fertility rates.
To make things more complicated, this varies a lot across racial and religious groups. For example, for Whites and Asian Americans, the highest fertility rates are found among the highest and lowest earners. But for Hispanic and Black women, fertility rates consistently get lower as women get wealthier.
Stone believes that culture, not income and education, is driving the decline in fertility rates. For example, he observes that fertility rates among the most religiously observant Americans are nearly three times higher than their secular neighbors.
While Stone doesn’t get into the cultural factors that might lead to lower fertility rates, others have certainly weighed in.
Johann Kurtz, known best for his excellent Substack “Becoming Noble,” recently argued in an essay titled “It’s embarrassing to be a stay-at-home Mom” that the problem comes down to “status.”
The value systems of liberal societies, Kurtz points out, confer low status on childbearing and mothering. While pre-Enlightenment status systems supported, or at least did not oppose, childbearing and mothering (thanks largely to the influence of Christianity, both were associated with virtue), post-Enlightenment liberal culture changed the game, emphasizing success over virtue.
It was only a matter of time, writes Kurtz, that women would demand “access to and participation within success games” like education, commerce, politics, and even sport.
“Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time-intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility,” he writes.
I agree with Kurtz’s assessment, but I would go even further and argue that we are no longer having children primarily because we are too bored to do so.
Boredom, as I argued in a recent Substack post, is a uniquely modern experience, a functional emotion that alerts us to a deeper despair, which is a psychological state marked by a lack of meaning, purpose, and hope. We ultimately cannot come up with any particular reason to do something rather than to do nothing.
In a report that surveyed adults who did not have children and adults who were not planning on having any, the most common response to “why?” was “I just didn’t want them” or “I wanted to focus on other things.” That seems consistent with boredom to me.
Any parent knows that raising children, despite the joys, is exceptionally difficult. To actively choose children, one must really believe that it is something that is worth doing, that there is a deep purpose and meaning in the act itself.
This is especially true in a consumer economy that bombards us with advertisements for various desirable products and experiences. Without a deeper sense of purpose and meaning to guide childbearing, children are merely another good that can be obtained to satisfy our novel appetites.
Ultimately, choosing to have children is an act of hope: You really have to be hopeful that there is something worth passing on to those spawned.
Stanley Hauerwas, the great philosopher, theologian, and curmudgeon whose work helped form my vision of the world in my younger years, put it this way: “For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope ... that God has not abandoned this world.”
Without that kind of hope, you’d likely find me choosing the most pleasurable and expedient thing in front of me, like vacations and brunches. A child is certainly not that thing.
My two teenagers are excellent kids. But I often feel hopeless about the future. I shudder to think about one potential future that my son faces: one where the robots have taken his job prospects, and he is left with porn, weed, and loneliness.
I believe my wife and I have given him enough of a substructure of hope: purpose, and meaning that he will be able to navigate this dystopian future. But if this is all we can hope for, why have kids?
Of course, hope is a virtue. It must be practiced, and the hopeful action must be actively chosen.
Acts of hope, as Wendell Berry illustrates in his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” simply do not compute within the logic of our modern society and economy:
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. … Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”
In November 2021, my wife and I did something that does not compute. We drove our family 600 miles from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to have a vasectomy reversed. We reopened ourselves to life, a decision made possible through the intervention of Our Lady of Lourdes (a story for a future essay).
Clearly, our act to bring new life into the world at 44 is not for everyone. But, to truly create a culture that can live hopefully toward the future, we all must make our own little incomputable acts.
