To Raise Birthrates, Pay People To Get Married

Paying people to have kids overlooks the crucial first step

Despite family-friendly social and economic policies, birthrates are falling in many rich countries. A recent article in the Financial Times notes that past declines were driven by families having fewer children, but now people are skipping having children altogether. “Nobody really knows what’s going on,” writes FT. “It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological.”

An Economist analysis published last year offers an answer to the mystery. Many assume that declining birthrates owe mainly to college-educated women delaying motherhood—putting off having kids for too long and ultimately having fewer children than they wanted. This belief has shaped policy responses, emphasizing tax breaks and subsidized childcare to help women balance careers and family life. But according to The Economist, that’s not what’s happening.

Though college-educated women are having children later, the shift is minor. In the U.S., the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today. These women still have about as many kids as their peers did a generation ago—just slightly fewer than what they say would be ideal, which has always been the case.

The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.

A generation ago, poorer women often had children with the hope that doing so would lead to marriage and family stability. This bet rarely worked out. In Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (2005), sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas chronicle research from the 1990s and early 2000s showing that, when these women had a baby, eight out of ten were still in a relationship with the child’s father, and nearly half lived together. In other words, most “single mothers” weren’t truly single at the time of their child’s birth; they were unmarried but partnered. When asked about their future, nearly all these women expected to stay with their partners and eventually marry. By the baby’s first birthday, though, half of these couples had split. By the time the child turned three, two-thirds had gone their separate ways.

Their Millennial and Gen Z children witnessed this failure, absorbed its lessons, and grew up not having kids. As I describe in my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, I lived in homes during the 1990s and 2000s with two girls who became mothers at 16, then had another child at 18 and another in their 20s—all with different fathers. Interestingly, they only had daughters. Those girls are now in their mid-twenties. None has children.

The kids also lack two key advantages their mothers had. First is a mental template of a stable family. Most Baby Boomer and Gen X women who had children out of wedlock had grown up in intact families and still believed marriage was in the cards for them. Their children, having seen those relationships fall apart, don’t have the same expectation. Second, the kids lack support from married grandparents. Biological anthropologist Richard Bribiescas has pointed out that grandmothers played a crucial evolutionary role in human societies by helping care for their grandchildren, allowing their daughters to have more children. Even in recent decades, grandmothers could ease the childcare burden because their husbands handled other responsibilities. Today, many Baby Boomer and Gen X women who had children outside of marriage are grandmothers without partners. Without that extra support, they’re less able to help their daughters raise kids.

Many learn about this decline in pregnancy among poor, unmarried women and applaud it. There’s another way to think about this, though. Fertility among married couples hasn’t declined; overall birthrates have dropped largely because fewer young people are getting married.

Thus, efforts to boost birthrates might be more effective if they focused on promoting marriage. Unfortunately, as economist Melissa Kearney points out in her book The Two-Parent Privilege, cultural tastemakers are reluctant to do this. Elites can’t necessarily impose values on everyone else, but they can invalidate them. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95 percent. By 2005, after a decades-long elite cultural repudiation of marriage, that figure remained high among affluent families (85 percent) but had plummeted to just 30 percent among working-class families.

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The idea that marriage doesn’t matter is what I call a luxury belief—an opinion that confers status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the lower classes. At a 2017 Senate hearing, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated, “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas. . . . Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.” Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom, and loose sexual norms soon spread to the rest of society. Yet, the upper class largely maintained intact families—experimenting sexually in college, perhaps, but settling down later. Lower-class families fell apart.

This deterioration continues. In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed that it was “very important” for couples with children to be married. By 2020, that number had dropped to 31 percent. Among college graduates, only 25 percent say marriage should come before parenthood. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: most college-educated parents in the U.S. are married.

The vast majority of people still say they prefer to marry before having children.

As a society, we could encourage poor, unmarried young people to marry first, then have kids. Many countries now offer financial incentives for childbirth—but since most people want to marry before having children, why not incentivize marriage instead? Of course, you could do both.

First offer money to people to get married (tax breaks aren’t effective enough), then pay them more to have kids.

Married people tend to have children. By encouraging marriage, we could naturally help raise fertility rates.

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A version of this article was originally published by City Journal under the title “Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage.”