The "Zombie Myth" About Why Birth Rates Are Dropping

If birth rates are falling, is it really because people want fewer kids—or because they feel like they can’t afford them?

In this episode, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt unpack the growing gap between “preference” and “choice” when it comes to starting a family. From the rising financial and social costs of raising children to the pressure of modern parenting norms, they explore why having kids today feels harder, even for people who say they want them. The conversation dives into everything from delayed careers and housing affordability to the hidden impact of social media, the “arms race” of parenting, and what we can learn from Quebec’s subsidized childcare experiment.

The big takeaway: there’s no single cause and no single fix. But if we want a society where people can truly choose the family size they want, we may need to rethink everything from childcare and housing to culture itself.

Research/links:

Fertility Postponement, Economic Uncertainty, and the Rising Income Prerequisites of Parenthood – van Wijk and Billari (2024)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padr.12624

Fertility Incentives in Canada: A Cohort Analysis – Lee and Liu (2024)
https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-075-2024.pdf

The Role of Social Comparisons and Intensive Parenting – Mahler, Tertilt, and Yum, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2025)
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/5_Mahler_Tertilt_Yum_unembargoed.pdf

Not Just Later, but Fewer: Novel Trends in Cohort Fertility in the Nordic Countries – Demography (2021)
https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/58/4/1373/174063/Not-

Just-Later-but-Fewer-Novel-Trends-in-Cohort
Workism and Fertility: The Case of the Nordics (2024)
https://www.aei.org/articles/workism-and-fertility-the-case-of-the-nordics/

The Effect of Family Fertility Support Policies on Fertility – Zhang et al. (2023)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/
Fertility trends across the OECD: Underlying drivers and the role for policy: 

Society at a Glance 2024 | OECD
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-2024_918d8db3-en/full-report/fertility-trends-across-the-oecd-underlying-drivers-and-the-role-for-policy_770679b8.html

Why Americans Are Delaying Parenthood
https://www.prb.org/news/why-americans-are-delaying-parenthood/

Canada is among countries with an ‘ultra-low fertility’ rate. What is behind the drop?
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/canada-is-among-countries-with-an-ultra-low-fertility-rate-what-is-behind-the-drop/

World Happiness Report 2026 | The World Happiness Report
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/

She’s (Not) Having a Baby
https://www.cardus.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shes-Not-Having-a-Baby.pdf

Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux

Produced by Meredith Martin

Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

How do I subdivide the living room to make a makeshift baby nook? Or maybe I could just put the crib in the closet and make that work for a bit?

SPEAKER_00 0:06

I see a successful society as being one that creates a choice for the middle class, that they can choose to own or rent. They can choose to have three kids or four kids or no kids, that the choices they make aren't because they're priced out of some options, but because they have real choices on how to live their lives.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Demographics posted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

There's this zombie myth that the fertility rate of a country, province, or city is simply a function of family planning and the changing preferences of society. That is, that once you account for those, nothing else matters, and no amount of public policy can change the trajectory of birth rates. And while it is true that fertility rates and birth rates are falling almost everywhere, they're not falling at the same rate. And it turns out there are other factors that matter, and those revolve around the rising costs, both economic and social, of having children.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

The it's just a preference argument drives me a little crazy because it does sound reasonable, but then you start looking at the research, and I've been going through some of that. The picture's so much more complicated than just people don't want to have kids anymore. Each of the areas we're going to talk about is something we do want to go deeper into, but I want to start off with what I suspect will be a long series of episodes on our declining fertility rate. And the big question is: are people just choosing to have fewer children or are they responding to external factors?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

You used a word there that's incredibly important. And that word is choice. I often hear the argument that couples are having fewer children because they're choosing to have fewer children. And at one level, that's absolutely true. But I'm always tempted to respond to that statement about choice with a quote from one of the greatest Gen X movies ever, The Princess Bride. And that's you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. And I'll I'll illustrate that with an example. I don't drive very much, but when I do, I tend to take some fairly long road trips. Now, if gas prices were to go up to say five bucks a liter, I'd take fewer of them. Now that's a choice. If I wanted to, I could suck it up and just absorb the extra cost, but I choose to take fewer trips. But that choice was motivated by that increase in cost. So it's a false dichotomy when people suggest that some factor doesn't play a role in falling fertility rates because couples are choosing to have fewer children. That choice was influenced by a change as you described it in external factors, specifically a change in costs. In other words, people use choice and preferences interchangeably, but they're actually two very different things. And in my road trip example, my preference for road trips didn't change, but my choice of how many to take did because the cost changed.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yeah, it's a bit frustrating because there's a substantial amount of research showing that birth rates are influenced by a number of factors, such as, let's start with when parents feel ready to have their first child. And then there's the societal expectations on parents, the cost of childcare, the role of social media, and of course the cost of housing. So I want to go through these one at a time.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Yeah, sounds good.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

The first on my list is what researchers call the rising prerequisites of parenthood, which is just a fancy way to say whether someone feels ready to have kids. And that has to do with income level, the stage of life they're in, all the things young adults feel they need to reach before they're ready to have their first kid. That bar has risen substantially over the last two decades. And like this isn't just a housing affordability story. It shows up in places where housing hasn't even gone completely off the rails the way it has in Canada. It's a cultural shift in what ready looks like. Like before, people worried less about job security, whereas now that's much more important to people.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah, I have a bit of a different take on it. I think it's not that people worried less about job security in the past, but rather that career started much earlier in the past. So, my mom, for example, she started her career before she was 20 years old. So by the time she was in her mid-20s, she was already well established in her profession. And back then you were more secure in your career when you were 26 or 27 because you'd been in that profession for a few years. But nowadays, you might not get out of school with your masters until you're 24 or 25. So as a 26-year-old, you don't nearly have the same job security or track record. So I'd say credential inflation has caused all of us to start our careers much later. So it takes us much longer to find the level of security to make us comfortable to have kids. And that's before taking into account that it takes much longer to save for a first home than it used to.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Interestingly, American Survey tended to cite economic concerns, even when they had decent jobs and a relatively stable income, which makes that like a really hard thing to change because it's a feeling of economic readiness that matters even more than the reality. So you can't just pull out numbers and prove to people that look, you are ready to have kids, and I don't think you can legislate this problem away because it's about how people feel.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Well, I actually disagree that you can't legislate it away, or I would say that public policy still matters here. For instance, I do think we should look at the length of undergraduate and graduate programs. You make them shorter, let people graduate earlier, and let them get on with their careers and frankly their lives sooner. But you do raise an important point that security is not the same as affordability. If you don't feel secure in your job, you might forgo having kids, even if on paper you can afford them.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

We've also changed the timeline for when society thinks you're ready to have kids. Like in the 70s, the average age of a mom giving birth was in their mid-20s, whereas now it's in the low 30s. And anecdotally, I find that people think if you're having kids in your 20s, that's really young these days. But biologically, it's really not. And more people are getting help for getting pregnant than ever before, which might partly be greater access to treatments. But we do know that biologically, it is better to have kids earlier. So being and feeling ready earlier is really important. The research also flagged the societal expectation of parents. And so that could partly be a social media thing or a cultural shift. I mean, I get targeted with Instagram parenting influencer accounts all the time. They show people's beautifully crafted Montessori-inspired nurseries. Whereas I first got pregnant when I was in a one-bedroom apartment and I was trying to figure out like, how do I subdivide the living room to make a makeshift baby nook, or maybe I could just put the crib in the closet and make that work for a bit?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yeah, and I think it started even earlier than that. Like if you go back to the 1970s, for example, I think you just needed less planning. You know, Gen Xers like me, we were the latchkey generation. It was seen as perfectly normal that an eight-year-old would walk to an empty house, unlock the door, you make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you sit down in front of the TV, you watch Scooby-Doo or Speed Racers, maybe you get out the Atari 2600, you go play some Space Invaders. But if I did that to buy kids, I'd probably get arrested. So this societal need and occasionally legal requirement to have kids constantly monitored to get them into expensive activities and sports has substantially increased both the time cost and the financial costs of raising kids.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah, it's wild how scheduled some kids are. I know there are probably benefits to it, but it's so tough to keep such a busy schedule. Like I have my four-year-old in one activity a week, and I feel like I'm holding her back compared to some of her peers because I just don't have the energy, especially with two kids, to have her in several programs a week, like so many kids in her class. And there's a 2025 Brooking study that argued that the cost per child has risen as parents have been able to more easily compare their children's success to other parents, creating what they describe as an arms race, an educational investment, both in the actual cost as well as how much of a time commitment kids can be.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Yeah, I could totally see that. This was less of an issue when I was growing up, in part because there weren't as many options when it came to increasing the quote unquote educational investment in a young child.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

And social media has put this on steroids. You can see what your kids' friends are doing, and people show like the dinners they made from scratch and the super engaging playroom for kids who have never watched a screen before in their life and don't even know what a screen is. And no one is thinking when they're posting about their beautiful homes and nurseries that they might be swaying people to have fewer kids, but the research shows it does have an effect.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Keeping up with the Joneses as driven by social media, it can't be great for people's mental health, which probably doesn't increase their desire to have more kids. You know, for example, there's a world happiness report that came out recently that blames social media for the decline in happiness. And I suspect the more unhappy you are, the less likely it is that you're gonna want to have kids.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

There's growing evidence that social media is contributing to fertility decline through multiple channels, including in the way it undermines building strong connections, contributing to mental health challenges, especially among young women, and shifting norms about what a good life looks like. And then there's the cost of childcare.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Yeah, those childcare costs are absolutely killer. And they were less of an issue in previous decades, in part because it wasn't needed as much. Now, some of this was due to that latchkey kid phenomenon that I mentioned earlier. Well, part of it is that there were often a lot of relatives who could help out. Now, at a societal level, that wasn't necessarily a great thing as it relied on the usually unpaid contribution of older women, but it did make it cheaper and easier to have kids. And that only works as well if you can raise a kid near where their grandparents live, which has gotten increasingly difficult in Canada due to the housing crisis. We've seen, you know, folks have to move out of the GTA to places like Woodstock and Peterborough, you know, far away from grand and grandpa. So governments seem to have recognized this problem and are working to reduce the cost of childcare. Do we know if that's having any impact whatsoever on fertility rates?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Well, we do know that they are reducing the cost of childcare, but the number of spots isn't just not meeting the demand. So the costs are still high if you can't get a spot. But we actually have a really good natural experiment on this from Canada, thanks to Quebec in 1997, when Quebec introduced universal childcare at$5 a day. And a 2024 study looked at what actually happened to fertility across different cohorts of women afterwards. And for younger women, which they defined as 20 to 24, it actually worked. And the chances of them having a kid went up by almost seven percentage points. And a second child also by about seven percentage points, too.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

So for young women who hadn't started their families yet, subsidized childcare made having kids feel more manageable financially. And it sounds like they're responding by having more kids.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

It's true. But then for women in their low 30s who already had kids, the reform surprisingly decreased the probability of having more. And that was about five to seven percentage points for second and third births. And the theory that I read is that subsidized childcare made it so much easier for them to go back to work. And once they were working, the opportunity cost of having another kid went up significantly because no matter how you slice it, having kids is going to impact your career in some way. So these women didn't want to have more. And the broader research backs this up. There's evidence that childcare expansions increase fertility rates overall, while there's some studies on baby bonuses, which some people advocate for, such as Trump. And those tend to affect when people are having kids. They shift when people are having kids a little bit earlier, but it's not shifting the number of kids they're having in total. And that helps. We know it's easier for a 20-something woman to get pregnant and have a healthy baby than a woman in her 30s or even early 40s, but it's not increasing the number of children.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. And all of this just shows the complexity of this issue that, you know, different policies impact different groups differently. And it's not all one size fits all. And we see that a lot when it comes to the relationship between home prices and fertility rates. As we discussed in a previous episode, that we we saw that a high and rising home prices causes fertility rates to fall for young people who get priced out of family-sized homes, but it actually causes fertility rates to rise for the cohort who bought a home before they got expensive and the value rose sharply after they purchased it.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

That seems like one of those very obvious findings where, like, if you own a home and are gaining wealth, you probably feel more settled and able to take on additional expenses. But of course, if you're worried about housing security, you just don't want to throw children in the mix.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Yeah, absolutely. And this whole fertility rate discussion feels a lot like all of our housing affordability discussions that, you know, there's no one single cause, but there's also no one single policy that's going to fix all of this.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Which doesn't mean that policy doesn't matter because the research is still pretty clear that countries with good comprehensive packages they do better than countries without them.

unknown 12:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

So so where does all of this leave us? So we've got a rising bar for what ready to have kids means, a childcare policy that works better for some people than for others, and cultural forces that it seems that even the best welfare states can't fully counteract. So where do we go from here?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

So it means it's really complicated. And the real answer is that there is no single lever. You've got to attack the problem from all angles. Subsidized childcare isn't enough. Baby bonuses aren't enough. Affordable housing isn't enough. You need to address all of that, as well as gender equality and culture, everything all at once, which is also the hardest and most expensive way to approach this.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

So, in the end, it's just like we said at the beginning of this episode, is not just a change in preferences, but the rising societal and economic costs of raising a child matters.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Yeah, we see people choosing fewer kids, even in countries where kids are on paper well supported by the government, which is why these conversations connect with so many of our other episodes. There's a constant underlying problem of a housing and policy environment that just makes family formation harder than it needs to be.

unknown 13:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Now, I also think we need to be clear as a society about what we're trying to accomplish here. Now, I'm not sure how you see it, but in my mind, success is not defined by a higher fertility rate or birth rate. In the same way that I don't see a successful housing system as necessarily being one that has higher rates of ownership. Rather, I see a successful society as being one that creates choice for the middle class, that they can choose to own or rent. They can choose to have three kids or four kids or no kids, that the choices they make aren't because they're priced out of some options, but because they have real choices on how to live their lives. Now, I suspect in such a society, people would have larger families than they're having now. I suspect they would have their first child at a younger age. And I also suspect that home ownership rates would go up. But those, in my view, are outcomes of attaining the goal of increased choice, but not the goals themselves.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

For sure. It is all about choice. And we do know that people are having fewer kids than they otherwise would want to. That's what the research shows that people are saying. Like they want to have this number of kids. They don't have that number of kids. And I think a society that supports people making the choice to have kids is a good one because not only does our country depend on it, that isn't the real reason. Although I will say our producer Meredith did thank me for making another taxpayer. I just wish we could change a conversation on having kids because we focus so much on the cost and the sacrifices, the lack of elite, the career hit. And I wish we talked a little bit more about the joy too, because that's just as real as the sacrifices. And we need to make the path to having kids much easier than it is right now, because I think we'll see those third-order effects of these changes because places where fertility rates are higher also tend to have stronger communities and they have lower isolation, more intergenerational connection. And if you fix the conditions to have kids, you'll see some real benefits outside of this area too. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

If you have any thoughts or questions about the best Atari 2600 games to play after school, please send us an email to missingmiddle podcast at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

And we'll see you next time.