Americans want more kids. Here’s what’s stopping them.


Shumita Basu (0:00)

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This is Inconversation from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, why so many people want kids but feel like they can't have them.

Fewer babies are being born all over the world. According to the UN, global fertility rates have dropped from 4.8 births per woman in 1970 to 2.2 in 2024

For millions of people, it's not that they don't want kids. It's that between the rising cost of living, housing insecurity, changing norms around coupling up and career building, political anxiety, climate anxiety, well, bringing a kid into the world feels increasingly out of reach.

Anna Louie Sussman (1:34)

This used to be a really straightforward kind of basic experience. You met someone, you had a kid, it was just a part of life. And now for the people who still want this, it feels harder and harder to achieve.

Shumita Basu (1:47)

Anna Louie Sussman has spent years reporting on the intersection of economics, gender, and reproductive health. For her new book, Inconceivable, The Impossibility of a Family in an Age of Uncertainty, she looks at families in the US and around the world to unpack the many reasons why people who want kids are not having them, from the big structural forces all the way down to the personal choices. I sat down with Anna to talk with her about what we as a society lose when people who want to have children feel like they can't, and what exactly is keeping people from having the families they dream of.

Anna, I was hoping that you could start by just laying out the landscape as we see it right now. What kinds of choices are people making when it comes to having kids, and what are the biggest hurdles?

Anna Louie Sussman (2:39)

So, specifically starting after 2008, historically, there's often a decline in births following a financial crisis, but then it rebounds as the economy recovers. In this case, it's just kept falling and falling all over Europe and in the US. And researchers have found that the global financial crisis, and the way that people, particularly the way they perceived it and experienced it, led to a kind of ongoing anxiety and uncertainty about the future. I think the peculiarly global nature of it, the relentlessness of it, and the fact that this is now the internet era, the 24-hour cable news era, the you can't turn it off or tune it out era, which when people say, oh, but World War II is really bad and all these other periods have been really bad. And I think what is different about this moment is how exposed we are to what's typically bad news. So you have that as the kind of background noise of people's psychology. And at the same time, some of the same things, things that will be recognizable to Americans, the time it takes to establish yourself in terms of your education and employment, the cost of housing and wanting to have a roof over your head before you start a family, dating and partnership instability.

Those things are also taking place in places like Norway and Sweden and Denmark. And it's why I wanted to do some reporting in places where they have family policy that you and I could only dream of. In Norway, where my best friend lives, you get basically a year paid leave and then your one-year-old is guaranteed a place in a subsidized and really adorable typically because I've been, I've dropped my friend's son off at his nursery and really charming place from one year on. So you're quite set.

There are researchers in Nordic countries because they are very concerned about at the population level what's happening because their strong welfare state depends on people paying taxes into it. And so there's this kind of generational breakdown in that pact that really worries them.

Shumita Basu (4:50)

Right. Well, part of what those taxes are going toward is health care, which in those countries includes fertility treatment, things like IVF, which can help people with biological barriers start a family and make it more affordable to start a family.