Children Are Now Optional, but Most People Still Want Them

IN ADVANCED COUNTRIES, LOW FERTILITY IS LINKED TO THE HIGH COST OF BEING A PARENT, OR IN ECONOMIC TERMS, THE DIFFICULTY OF RECONCILING WORK AND FAMILY DUTIES. YET LESS THAN 20 PERCENT OF ADULTS NEVER BECOME MOMS AND DADS, AND EVEN LESS VOLUNTARILY REMAIN CHILDLESS

by Letizia Mencarini, Dept. of Management and Technology, Bocconi
Translated by Alex Foti

 
What is the value of children? Why in some countries do women have so many children, while in others fertility has dropped to little more than one child per woman? Surely it depends on the level of economic development, but not only that.
 
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest and most underdeveloped area of the world, the fertility rate is  5 children per woman on average (going over 6 children in Mali, Angola, Burundi, Somalia, Congo and South Sudan, and over 7 in Niger). The high number of newborns in these areas is correlated with the high poverty of families, but despite considerable advances in knowledge and the spread of contraception, fertility does not decrease. Why? Of course, having many children in these countries is a form cultural conformism that gives great social status to the parents. But it's not just this. African parents, especially in rural areas, have good reasons to wish for numerous offspring: rearing costs are very low and children are guarantees of economic and material assistance in old age. According to the Australian demographer Jack Caldwell, in poor countries, in particular in agricultural contexts, intergenerational wealth flows from children to parents. So we can say that fertility remains high, because the demand for children remains high.

Contraception is a technical tool needed to control reproduction, but its knowledge, availability and economic accessibility, next to other factors, has little impact on fertility and above all does not reduce fertility to desired levels. What induces parents to want less children is above all the increase in the cost of raising a child. The direct and indirect costs of rearing increase in urban contexts and with schooling, which delays the start of working life for young people and increases the parents' investment in children. In particular, the expansion of female schooling, in addition to delaying the start of reproductive life (which in the poorest African countries still averages below 20 years of age), creates the basis for women's participation in the labor force, which in turn increases the opportunity cost of raising children. The creation of universal pension systems then dispenses with the motivation associated with the offspring being a source of social security for the elderly.
 
➜ The map of family welfare
The demonstration of this mechanism is evident in the historical path of all advanced countries, where economic development, expansion of education, and modernization went hand in hand with the decline in fertility. In all high-income countries, fertility is low and mostly under the demographic replacement level (two children per woman). Choosing to have children is clearly interrelated with a number of other decisions along the lifecycle. Having a child has become a sort of optional, which is very expensive and competes with other purposes in life. In short, it is not worth it: material and wealth flows in this case are clearly going from parents to children. However, in the most advanced of developed countries (such as Scandinavia and France), the creation of child care services and money transfers to households have lowered the cost of children and maintained fertility rates around replacement levels.
 
In other countries where welfare is much less generous, having children has become so expensive and reconciling work and parental work so difficult, that fertility rates have collapsed at very low levels (under one child and half on average in a vast area comprising Southern and Eastern Europe, but also East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore) and having a child worsens the objective and subjective well-being of parents for a long period after birth.
 
Then perhaps we should ask not so much why fertility is so low in some countries, but why, given the circumstances, it is not even lower. Why has having children not gone out of fashion? Even in low-fertility countries, on average less than a fifth of adults remain childless, and voluntary infertility is even rarer (as evidenced by the growing number of individuals who, for various reasons, resort to assisted reproductive techniques and even surrogate motherhood). The value of children is something that goes beyond the rationality of economic choice and which is deeply enmeshed with the meaning of human life.