u/CanIHaveASong

We've more than doubled the size of this community, and it's exciting to see so many people interested in discussing and promoting natalism.

But a community is more than a subscriber count. It's the conversations we have, the ideas we share, the questions we explore, and the connections we build.

Let's make this a place worth participating in! Share an interesting article, start a discussion, ask a question, or jump into a conversation already happening. You don't need to have all the answers or write a long essay to contribute.

Thank you to everyone who's helped us get here. Here's to the next milestone, and to building a stronger, more active pronatalist community together!

Among full time working women whose partners also wanted another child, high paternal involvement was associated with 1.73 times the odds of a second birth, compared with low involvement. Housework appeared to matter more than childcare.

Paper is free to read.

American earnings in the 20s have become comparatively lower. Most Americans do not meaningfully begin to accumulate wealth until their 30s.

Adults over 44 own 78% of all homes with 3 or more bedrooms. The majority of these homeowners have no one but a spouse living with them. The scarcity of family sized housing drives up the price beyond what the average person in their 20s and 30s can pay. Many US states do not require seniors to pay property taxes. This incentivizes them to stay in homes that are much larger than they need.

Many retirees are continuing to accumulate money. Yet we continue to take money from the young and poor to give to the old and rich.

Although there are dozens of factors that affect fertility, a handful of factors have a very large impact, and when you examine East Asia in light of these factors, their fertility numbers make sense.

1 - Beliefs about children

2 - Marriage

3 - Religiosity

4 - Housing

5 - Conditions around education and work

The post goes into each point at length, as to how China, Japan and Korea have all pushed hard for population control, how marriage norms have been eviscerated, and how each country is (even now!) trying to dismantle religious groups. They also have the most family unfriendly housing in the world, and work and education conditions that do not leave time for partnering or parenting.

"While most of eastern Asia struggles with low fertility and aging, the Philippines remains young and growing.
Housing is a big part of why. Nearly 90% of new housing in the Philippines is single-family homes."

"Move the at-home spouse into the labor market and every service she provided must be repurchased from the latest private equity roll-up (nursery, takeaway, cleaner, security system…). GDP records each purchase as growth. A family can thus be measured as substantially richer while consuming the same services — only now they spend less time together."

"The young are told they are richer, and in the currency of flat-screen televisions they are. But the goods that constitute a life — house, spouse, children, good school, good neighbors — have inflated so far beyond wages that the ordinary life path of 1965 now requires an extraordinary income. "

If you disagree, I'd love to hear about it!

The post is worth taking a direct look at. The paper shows:

Gen Z WANTS fewer children than any generation before it. (Desired fertility has been consistent since the boomers)

Gen Z HAS fewer women who have become mothers by age 26 than any other previous generation (previous generations did not show much variation in this metric)

Gen Z has noticably higher fertility imparment.

An argument that social contagion explains why fertility is collapsing globally:

>When Susannah McIntyre, 37, hauls her three young sons through her Cambridgeshire village, pedestrians mutter, she says. Cafés seem relieved to see them depart. When she was growing up, it was families with five children that seemed big. But at the local primary school, only two other families have three kids. Now she says she feels like an “outlier”, one who is looked down on with suspicion by people “who regard parenting as a self-indulgent lifestyle choice”.

>Across the world, parenthood is on the wane. In Europe, the only child is becoming the norm, with half of families with dependent children having only one. In the UK, the figure is 45 per cent, with just 14 per cent of families having three or more. This is repeated in unexpected places. The United Arab Emirates and Tamil Nadu in India now have lower birth rates than Germany. Mexico’s rate has fallen behind the US, where one-child families now outnumber families with two.

>Birth rates in more than two-thirds of the world’s countries have fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. The world population will soon start to decline, for the first time since the Black Death of the 14th century, with one estimate putting “peak human” as soon as 2064.

>There are many factors behind the baby bust. Young people are less likely to be in a relationship than previous generations were at the same age. It is harder for young couples to get on the housing ladder and to feel economically stable enough to contemplate adding a baby to the mix. And some worry whether it would be right to bring a child into a febrile world.

>But after five years of research, I have come to believe that there is something else at play too: a form of social contagion. In a world that appears to treat parents with hostility, where the advantages of raising children are obscured, remaining childless is easier if the same decision is made by everyone around you. As a phenomenon, it can become self-perpetuating.

>This extra factor — network effects — can explain the remarkable similarities between falling birth rates across very different places and cultures. It also offers humans a way to reverse the decline by making having children attractive again.

>Falling birth rates are often presented as a simple matter of choice. But in research of 10 low-fertility countries by Ester Lazzari and Eva Beaujouan, up to half of men and women end their reproductive years wishing they had more children. While passing peak human will ease the burden on natural resources, the drop in global population is projected to be rapid, ushering in legions of elderly who will strain welfare states and economies. In China, where a one-child policy introduced in 1980 distorted family planning for 35 years, there is now the “4-2-1 problem”, with an only child supporting two parents and four grandparents.

>There are other, subtle effects. As children become less visible, our tolerance for their noisy capriciousness dwindles. In Japan, crowdsourced Dorozoku maps show people how to avoid streets where “children play with balls”. In a smart Paris suburb, judges last year ordered a junior school to close its playground after neighbours complained about noise. At a clinic in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2022, I met Wanda Baker, who had been asked to stand outside because her sick baby and his two siblings were upsetting other patients. “I feel second class,” she said.

>“Families are society’s most basic unit and humanity’s most indispensable institution,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, demographer and Henry Wendt chair at the American Enterprise Institute. “But as families and their branches thin out, they will become ever less able to bear weight.” Policymakers, he adds, are “not ready for the age of depopulation which will recast societies, economies and power politics”.

>A low fertility trap

>Humans copy each other, a primal drive that goes all the way back to our early need to protect ourselves in tribes. Social norms developed as a way to outsource some of our decision-making. Co-operation with the group became instinctive. 

>Even in the modern world, the need to conform is powerful. In an early experiment demonstrating the power of social contagion from the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked participants to do a simple task, matching lines on a card, where the correct answer was obvious. Unaware that other participants were actors instructed by Asch, more than a third of participants went along with the group’s choice, despite this being obviously wrong.

>The impact of network effects on birth rates was well documented by a study in Brazil. The gradual introduction of broadcast signal into different regions in the 1980s was accompanied by a cliff-like fall in birth rates. People with signal had become gripped by telenovelas – soap operas – showing urban female protagonists with few or no kids. In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had just over six children. Forty years later it was just over two: a drop almost as rapid as China’s. The impact was strongest on the female viewers who were closest in age to the female characters, with whom they identified most strongly.

>More recent studies have corroborated such findings. Research from Sweden in 2010 showed that women working in offices were more likely to have a baby if a colleague of similar seniority did so, with no effect from co-workers at other levels. A separate study of 6,500 German companies similarly found that female employees’ transition rates to first pregnancy roughly doubled after a colleague had a baby, with the effect lasting about two years.

>The German social scientists Daniel Lois and Oliver Arránz Becker have found that couples’ interest in having a child strengthens if friends become parents. They suggest three possible factors: couples with children demystify parenthood for the network, create a social pressure on others to join them, and create a feeling that not joining might disrupt social ties.

>“Peer group behaviour signals what people like me are expected to do, and at what point in the life course,” says Anna Rotkirch, research professor at Finland’s Population Research Institute. “We have evolved to be very conscious of reproductive cues in our environment,” she says, adding that she feels these have become increasingly negative.

>The acceleration of the birth rate fall since the advent of the smartphone may have less to do with time spent on screens distracting from romance and more to do with negative images of childbirth and positive ones about being single. “Fear of pregnancy and the discourse about motherhood as sacrifice have become more common in the past 15 years,” says Rotkirch, with “many childless women mentioning fear of what happens to your body in childbirth as a reason for not having had a child”. 

>Several studies have found that seeing and holding real babies makes women keener to have their own baby — although they may be self-selecting.

>Social media increases the extent to which young adults interact with peers or role models they do not know and are not related to. “I have talked to young mothers who are surprised that posting on Instagram about having a baby is creating fewer ‘likes’ than posting about a fancy holiday trip,” says Rotkirch. “Young adults are increasingly taking their reproductive cues from people or platforms with no real interest or stakes in their family formation goals.”

>The situation today in England and Wales is that women born in 1979 are having smaller families than their baby boomer parents and greatest generation grandparents, while their Gen Z daughters are projected to have even smaller families still.

>A big reason that people end up with fewer children than they wanted is that we are leaving it later to start a family. European first-time mothers are 31, and fathers 34, compared with 1975 when the average ages were 26 for mothers and 30 for fathers. This in itself makes it harder to have multiple children.

>But the overarching pattern fulfils the “low fertility trap” hypothesis proposed by the economists Vegard Skirbekk, Wolfgang Lutz and Maria Rita Testa in 2006. They contended that once fertility declines below replacement level, the subsequent shrinking of each generation may entrench childlessness as a norm which becomes harder to reverse. The downward spiral lessens social pressure to have a family.

>It is true that no country that has fallen well below two children per woman has yet rebounded to anything like that level. South Korea has ticked up a little, from 0.75 in 2024 to 0.8 in 2025, but it’s not yet clear whether that is a temporary phenomenon, a result of women having one child a little younger.

>As time goes on, a rebound could become less and less possible. In China, the writer Helen Gao has suggested that “none of China’s only children can imagine what raising multiple children could look like”. If you grew up without siblings, and your friends did too, why would you want something different? Add in the absurd demands of modern intensive parenting, and all the other things you can do with your time in the modern world, and it’s no surprise that so many couples now declare themselves “one and done”.

>Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that mimetic theory, the cultural influences on human behaviour, is playing an overlooked role in the baby bust. “The increasing rarity of large families could make it harder for humans to choose to return to having them — owing to what scholars call loss of social learning — and prolong low levels of fertility,” he says.

>Baby bonus

>Hopes of filling the demographic gap are often pinned on immigration. But newcomers to a country are also influenced by social norms. In a Norwegian survey, majorities of first-generation immigrants from Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey said that it was very important to have children in order to have a happy marriage. By the second generation, fewer than half expressed this view. Somali-heritage women have an average of seven children in Somalia, but two in Norway.

>One study has even found that Polish women moving to England and Wales ended up having more children than their peers back home, mirroring the household average of their new country, even though it often costs more to raise a child in London than in Warsaw.

>Groups that retain stronger ties to their countries of origin, and which have strong religious faith, are less immediately influenced. But the data suggests they still eventually produce smaller families. The fertility rate among Pakistani women in the UK dropped by 38 per cent between 2001 and 2021, according to the Migration Observatory.

>If immigration provides no solution, perhaps network effects themselves can be used. Making children seem desirable, possible and visible is a feature of two companies that are bucking the birth-rate trend in low-fertility countries.

>In Taiwan, chipmaker TSMC’s employees make up around 0.3 per cent of the population but were parents to 1.8 per cent of Taiwanese babies in 2023. Hsinchu County, where the company is based, has more children per 100 working-age adults than any other region. It has created an environment in which children are highly visible, with wraparound childcare on site and a pre-school on each of its campuses.

>Similarly LOTTE, the South Korean retail empire, has an internal birth rate which is more than double the national one, at 2.05 babies born per woman compared to 0.8. The company, which employs around 60,000 people, has strong parental leave policies. For example, it is compulsory for fathers to take at least one month of paternity leave on full pay. In recognition of its efforts, the company has been commended by South Korea’s Population Strategy Committee.

>The pattern can be transposed. In Nagi, a Japanese mountain town, population decline became an existential issue in 2002, when the dwindling number of residents created pressure to merge with other prefectures. The mayor instead worked hard to offer financial incentives including baby bonuses, generous daycare and free healthcare for children. Residents take a whole-community approach, with pensioners stepping in to help out, and children are seen as a positive. The result is that while half of Japanese families have only one child, in Nagi, 47 per cent of households have three or more. 

The article is paywalled partway through, but there's still a lot of good content.

I know we have some Indians on this forum. Indian fertility has been below replacement for about 6 years now. Looks like Indian family planning policy is still to reward people for female sterilization. Any comments on that?

After noticing many differences between birth gauge’s numbers and official numbers, I have done some research over the week. Here is what I found:

-The Agency of Statistics for Bosnia recorded a tfr of 1.2-1.3 not 1.7. That is also the tfr mentioned in the wikipedia demographics page

-Most official sources say Ukraine’s tfr has been below 1 since 2023-2024 and is at around 0.75-0.9 now. Birth gauge says 1.03

-Belarus is just wrong. Official sources say tfr is 1.03 in 2025. Birth gauge not only overestimates but also doesn’t even give the number of live births it used to calaculate its tfr and just says 1.19 for 2025.

-Russia is also just wrong, almost all official sources say Russia’s tfr has recorded a sharp decline in 2026. Estimated by demoria research.com to have declined from 1.37 in 2025 to 1.29 in 2026 with some states registering -15% to -27% declines. Birth gauge just says it went from 1.36 to 1.34 ??? That is literally wrong. Tfr can’t decline by 0.02 when live births declined by 8% and again birth gauge is the only source saying the decline isn’t sharp. Also without citing the live births it used.

-Almost every source on earth says Jamaica’s tfr is 1.3-1.5 . Birth gauge says 1.7 somehow ???? Not only that it says Jamaica went from 1.51 to 1.7 ??? I haven’t found anything on the web saying Jamaica recorded such a fast rise in tfr. They all say it’s pretty stagnant with the tfr being around 1.3-1.4.

-All official sources say Colombia’s tfr is around 1.03-1.06. Idk where birth gauge got the 1.2 number from

-Ecuador’s tfr should be much higher in 2024 than in 2026 based on official number of live births.

-a post was posted recently from new official data in argentina which says argentina’s tfr went from 1.23 in 2024 to 1.04 in 2025. Why is birth gauge saying it went from 1.18 in 2024 to 1.12 in 2025. What data is birth gauge using exactly?

-some numbers also don’t make sense mathematically Brazil recording a 3% decline in births would not result in the tfr declining from 1.53 to 1.50. More like to 1.48. Because Brazil has a stagnant female fertile population. Also other official sources say the decline is worse (-3.8%) which make the tfr around 1.47

-all official sources say Botswana’s tfr in 2024 was 1.96 not 2.16.

-Official sources say Algeria is at 2.44 in 2024 not 2.61. This subreddit itself keeps posting a map from 2024 that says Algeria is 2.44 but birth gauge says 2.61 ???

-Now the Tunisian numbers are not only wrong for 2025 but possibly even back to 2023 and the numbers in birth gauge are literally completely mathematically illogical. The actual numbers vary but what we all know is that Tunisia recorded a sharp tfr decline in 2022-2025 because births went from 147K (2022), 135K (2023), 126K (2024), 118K (2025), this is clearly a case where the tfr would be much lower each year than the year before it. The most accurate thing which is the one used on wikipedia is 1.7 in 2022, 1.58 in 2023, 1.48 in 2024, 1.40 in 2025. Birth gauge says 1.54 in 2024, fine I have seen some sources say that, even tho it doesn’t mathematically make sense since it requires the tfr to be higher in 2022, but then birth gauge says 1.53 in 2025 ? In what world does this work mathematically. with a stagnant female fertile population, and a -5.34% decline in births, tunisia’s tfr in 2025 is definitely in the 1.4 range

-Armenia isn’t updated. It’s a -2.8% decline and tfr should be 1.59-1.61 even with what’s mentioned in birth gauge not 1.65

-most if not all sources say Kyrgyztan’s tfr is below 3.4-3.5 range (birth gauge says 3.51)

-Wikipedia says 1.37 for Sri Lanka and birth gauge also used to put it in the 1.3 range. Why did 2024-2026 numbers suddenly become 1.45-1.46.

-Demographics Statistics from Malaysia’s government website gives a -4.6% decline in births between 2025 and 2026 not -0.7. This would make the tfr 1.35 not 1.4.

Things I am not sure of:

-Many eastern european countries seem to have generally recorded a worse decline in tfr in 2026 than suggested by birth gauge.

Bolivia’s estimated total fertility rate of 1.56 hides a big asymmetry: a small minority group, the Mennonites, who speak Low German, has a much higher one.

Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes counter the arguement that the new proposal by the Czechian governement is "useless". The original arguement is that Czechia is not suffering from a lack of second births, but a lack of first births, and this policy will not move the needle much.

Stone and Brooks argue that 2+ births have also declined, and that Czechia has responded posiltively to similar pronatalist interventions in recent years. Therefore the new cash bonus for second babies is possibly helpful.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2099247332105539695/photo/1

Graph from X.com. Preview didn't show up, unfortunately.

A couple juicy excerpts from teh summary.

The Soviet state always had a problem with the theory of population. Both Marx and Lenin famously rejected Malthus’ idea that population is guided by its own set of universal laws and internal mechanisms of regulation. For Marx, population processes were not a law of nature but a function of the socioeconomic order. In a capitalist society, the ruling class seeks to ensure a surplus population, that is, a latent labor reserve, in order to extract resources and accumulate wealth. In the socialist mode of production, the official ideology of the Soviet Union posited, the central economic planning would regulate population structure and would make pronatalist interventions associated with Malthusianism redundant.

...

The most fascinating parts of Nakachi's study discuss how the 1944 family law introduced legal changes that essentially contradicted its own pronatalist agenda—changes that transformed the state of the Soviet family for generations to come. In the new Soviet state, common-law marriages were the law of the land. The 1944 family law annulled this practice and institutionalized registered marriages as the only legitimate marital union, also making divorce proceedings more difficult and costlier. Mothers of children born outside of the registered marriages were denied an option to establish legal fatherhood, even in courts. Instead, the state offered but ultimately failed to shoulder the financial responsibility for raising children born outside of registered marriages.

It is not entirely clear how these legal innovations were supposed to encourage women to procreate and increase the birthrate, and, statistically speaking, they indeed failed. What is clear is that the policy ultimately provided a foundation for freeing biological fathers from taking legal responsibilities for children born outside of their registered marriage and gave rise to a new social institution of unmarried mothers raising legally fatherless children. By institutionalizing single motherhood and a new generation of “fatherless children” (bezotzovshina), the family law created new social stigmas of illegitimacy and moral degradation, to which some of the women's voices in the book attest. The law also shaped new normative understandings of gender roles in the family, leading to a well-recognized Soviet family model, where mothers play a central and singular role in raising children and caring for the household.

The implementation of the new family law was equally contradictory; it reflected the state's continuous efforts to reconcile interventionist pronatalist policies with the economic determinism that characterized Soviet ideology. Implementing the law and providing women with financial aid was supposed to mitigate a growing rate of abortions, made illegal by the Soviet state in 1936. In effect, the law joined the ban on abortions and became another punitive pronatalist measure that made the reproductive behavior of Soviet citizens and especially women an object of government intervention. The main agents of these interventions were medical professionals, especially gynecologists and obstetricians, who “were tasked with responsibility for birthrate growth” (p. 65) and played a special role in the drama of population revival. They were asked to help both prosecuting illegal abortions and improving women's health care through prophylactic measures; all that in order to facilitate population growth.

UNFPA and YouGov surveyed roughly 14,000 people in 14 countries, representing more than a third of the world's population. Their headline findings include:

• Nearly 1 in 5 reproductive-age adults expect to be unable to have as many children as they want.
• 39% said financial limitations had affected or would affect their ability to achieve their desired family size.
• Nearly 1 in 5 said concerns about the future—climate change, environmental degradation, war, pandemics, etc.—would lead or had led them to have fewer children than desired.
• Nearly 1 in 4 had experienced being unable to have a child at the time they wanted.

The report identifies several major barriers:

1. Money and economic insecurity

2. Lack of a suitable partner

3. Work and gender inequality

4. Infertility and reproductive health

5. Fear about the future

6. Social and institutional barriers

The report also considers situations in which people's family formation is constrained by laws, social norms, discrimination, or lack of recognition of their desired family arrangements.

It's been a lovely six weeks since we launched! We have grown by about 200 members in this time. Welcome everybody!

We noticed in the last couple weeks that our rules needed a little tweaking. Some of them were catching posts that we wanted to encourage, and some of them were not as clear as they could have been. We also wanted to define the subreddit in positive terms: Tell people how we want them to engage, instead of how we don't want them to engage.

Here are the changes:

1. We changed rule 1 from "no contempt" to "Be kind and respectful"
2. After some thought, we changed rule 2 from "No antinatalism" to "Stay relevant to pronatalism". We also rolled “keep discussion at the policy level” into this new rule. We believe this new rule comes much closer to capturing the spirit we were looking for with those two rules. And while we believe policy level discussion is the heart of this community, we want to create space in this community for the personal touch and human stories.
3. To aid that, we've added some post tags: "Personal story", and "Advice wanted"

We've removed a few posts in the last few weeks: A few from someone who was making some very loaded claims, such as “all natalists want to control women's bodies”, one from someone who was complaining about r/natalism, and one from one of the mods that sparked more gender-war type discourse than positive discussion.

What I would like to hear from you all:

• If you disagree with our removals, please argue your case here.
• We're trying to create a space that fosters positive discussion of natalism- that doesn't block a particular point of view, but focuses on keeping the conversation productive. In your view, are we accomplishing this?
• Do you think we could use some different rules?
• How are post and user tags working for you? Would we benefit from some new or different ones?
• Several people have asked for a place to request advice. How can we create room for that here?

And any other feedback, of course.

Thank you for your participation! I'm hoping we can continue to grow the sub, and create a great place for discussion of natalism.

Growing up in a large family often means taking care of younger siblings. Some argue that these extra chores, like warming a bottle or babysitting a little brother, count as “parentification,” in which kids take on a parenting role too early. Proponents of this view suggest that girls from larger families are less eager to become parents themselves. But data from the General Social Survey suggests the opposite: women who grew up in big families tend to have more kids of their own. On average, each additional sibling is associated with having 0.2 more children

I spent a good deal of time studying an American case that surprised me. Houston and San Francisco have similar incomes and job markets, yet Houston's price-to-income ratio for housing has stayed far more stable for decades, while San Francisco's has exploded. The difference isn't luck. Houston has no traditional zoning code. San Francisco has some of the strictest land-use regulation in the country. That single policy gap alone can eat up years of a young family's income before they even start thinking about a first or second child.

That comparison was the seed of a bigger project. I ended up tracing the same pattern across five East Asian economies (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and four European countries (UK, Germany, France, Sweden), decade by decade, tracking tax burden, housing cost, education cost, and fertility rate, plus healthcare-system data from several more countries. The pattern holds everywhere I looked. Modern welfare and regulatory states have built at least six distinct mechanisms, what I call "the six nooses," that make childbearing more expensive, more delayed, or more discouraged than it would be under a freer market.

I wrote up the full argument on Mises Wire (it's since been picked up by ZeroHedge and a few other outlets). It's adapted from a book I published this year, Why the Cradle Stands Empty: How Interventionism Strangles Fertility.

Link: https://mises.org/mises-wire/six-nooses-how-interventionism-strangling-familys-will-reproduce

I'm the author. Happy to answer questions or hear pushback on any of it.

many of the USA's highest marriage-rate regions are found across the interior