The Illusion of Choice: Why We’re Having Fewer Kids

Is the declining birth rate a shift in preference or a response to a broken economy?

We often hear that falling birth rates are simply a matter of “changing preferences”—that modern couples just don’t want as many children as their parents did. But as Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt explore in this episode, there is a massive difference between a preference and a choice made under duress.

When the “prerequisites” for parenthood become moving targets that shift further into our 30s, the decision to have fewer kids looks less like a lifestyle trend and more like an economic survival strategy.

From the “arms race” of Montessori-perfect Instagram nurseries to the surprising data behind Quebec’s subsidized childcare experiment, we ask: Is society actually giving the middle class a choice, or are we just pricing them out of the future they want?

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Mike Moffatt: 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. It turns out there are other factors that matter, and those revolve around the rising costs, both economic and social, of having children.

Cara Stern: 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. The picture is 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 want to go deeper into, but I want to start with what I suspect will be a long series of episodes on our declining fertility rate. The big question is: are people just choosing to have fewer children, or are they responding to external factors?

Mike Moffatt: You used a word there that’s incredibly important: choice. I often hear the argument that couples are having fewer children because they’re choosing to do so. 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: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I’ll illustrate that with an example.

I don’t drive very much, but when I do, I take fairly long road trips. Now, if gas prices were to go up to $5 a liter, I’d take fewer of them. That’s a choice. If I wanted to, I could suck it up and absorb the extra cost, but I choose to take fewer trips. However, that choice was motivated by that increase in cost.

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 in external factors, specifically a change in cost. In other words, people use “choice” and “preferences” interchangeably, but they’re actually two very different things. 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.

Cara Stern: 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. Let’s start with when parents feel ready to have their first child. Then there’s societal expectations, the cost of childcare, the role of social media, and of course, the cost of housing. I want to go through these one at a time.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, sounds good.

Cara Stern: 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. That has to do with income level, the stage of life they’re in, and 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. This isn’t just a housing affordability story; it shows up in places where housing hasn’t even gone completely off the rails like it has in Canada. It’s a cultural shift on what ready looks like. Before, people worried less about job security, whereas now that’s much more important.

Mike Moffatt: I have a bit of a different take. I think it’s not that people worried less about job security in the past, but rather that careers started much earlier. My mom, for example, started her career before she was 20. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, she was well-established in her profession. Back then, you were more secure in your career at 26 or 27 because you’d been in that profession for a few years.

Nowadays, you might not get out of school with your Masters until you’re 24 or 25. As a 26-year-old, you don’t have that same job security or track record. Credential inflation has caused us to start our careers much later, so it takes longer to find the security needed to feel comfortable having kids. And that’s before taking into account that it takes much longer to save for a first home then it used too.

Cara Stern: Interestingly, American surveys tended to cite economic concerns even when participants had decent jobs and a relatively stable income. Which makes it a really hard thing to change because it’s the feeling of economic readiness matters even more than the reality. You can’t just pull numbers and prove to people that they are ready. I don’t think you can legislate this problem away because it’s about how people feel.

Mike Moffatt: Well, I actually disagree that you can’t legislate it away. Public policy still matters. For instance, we should look at the length of undergraduate and graduate programs. Make them shorter, let people graduate earlier, and let them get on with their lives sooner. But you raise an important point: 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.

Cara Stern: We’ve also changed the timeline for when society thinks you’re ready. In the 70s, the average age of a mom giving birth was in her mid-20s; now it’s in the low 30s.

Anecdotally, people think having kids in your 20s is “really young,” but biologically it’s not. And more people are getting help with getting pregnant then ever before. Which partly may be because of greater access to treatment. But we do know biologically it is better to have kids earlier. So being and feeling ready earlier is really important.

The research also flagged societal expectations of parents. That could partly be a social media thing or a cultural shift. I get targeted with Instagram “parenting influencer” accounts all the time showing beautifully crafted, Montessori-inspired nurseries. Whereas when I first got pregnant, I was in a one-bedroom apartment trying to figure out how to subdivide the living room or if I could put the crib in the closet!

Mike Moffatt: I believe it started even earlier than that. In the 1970s, you just needed less planning. Gen Xers like me were the “latchkey generation”. It was normal for an eight-year-old to walk to an empty house, unlock the door, and make a peanut butter sandwich while watching Scooby-Doo or Speed Racers. Maybe you get out the Atari 2600 and play some Space Invaders. If I did that to my kids today, I’d probably get arrested. The expectations have changed. This societal need and occasionally legal requirement—to have kids constantly monitored and to get them in expensive activities/sports has increased both the time and financial costs of raising them.

Cara Stern: 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. I have my 4-year-old in one activity a week, and I feel like I’m holding her back compared to some of her peers because I don’t have the energy, especially with two kids, to have her in several programs a week like so many kids in her class.

There is a 2025 Brookings study that argued the cost per child has risen as parents compare their children’s success to others, creating an “arms race” of educational investment, both in the actual cost and how much of a time commitment kids can be.

Mike Moffatt: I can totally see that. This was less of an issue when I was growing up because there weren’t as many options to increase that “educational investment” in a young child.

Cara Stern: And social media has put this on steroids. You can see what your kids’ friends are doing.

People show the dinners made from scratch, and the super engaging playrooms 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 persuading people to have less kids. But the research shows it does have an effect.

Mike Moffatt: “Keeping up with the Joneses” as driven by social media can’t be great for mental health, which doesn’t increase our desire to have more kids. For example a recent World Happiness report blamed social media for a decline in happiness, and the more unhappy you are, the less likely you are to want kids.

Cara Stern: There’s growing evidence that social media is contributing to fertility decline by undermining connections, contributing to mental health challenges especially among young woman and shifting norms about what a “good life” looks like. And then, there’s the cost of childcare.

Mike Moffatt: Those childcare costs are absolute killer. They were less of an issue in previous decades in part because it wasn’t needed as much. Some of this was due to that “latchkey kid” phenomenon.

Well part of it is there was often a lot of relatives who could help out. Now on a societal level it wasn’t a great thing because it relied on the unpaid contribution of older women. But it did make it cheaper and easier to have a kid. And that only worked as well if you could raise a kid near where their grandparents live, which has become increasingly difficult in Canada due to the housing crisis.

We’ve seen folks have to move out of the GTA to places like Woodstock and Peterborough. Far away from Grandma and Grandpa. So governments seemed to have recognized this problem and are working to reduce the cost of childcare. Do we know if that has had any impact on fertility rates?

Cara Stern: They are reducing costs, but the number of spots isn’t meeting demand. So the cost are still high if you can’t get a subsidized spot.

We have a good natural experiment from Quebec. In 1997, Quebec introduced $5-a-day childcare. A 2024 study looked at what happened to fertility across different cohorts of women afterwards. And for younger women (20-24), it actually worked, and the chances of having a first or second kid went up by seven percentage points.

Mike Moffatt: So for young women who hadn’t started their family yet, subsidized childcare made having kids feel manageable. And it sounds like they are responding by having more kids.

Cara Stern: True, but for women in their low 30s who already had kids, the reform actually decreased the probability of having more by 5 to 7 percentage points for second and third births.

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 are going to impact your career in some way. So these women didn’t want more.

The broader research backs this up. There is evidence that childcare expansions increase fertility rates overall. There are some studies on baby bonuses too, which some people advocate for, such as Trump, and those tend to affect when people have kids. They shift when people are having kids to a little bit earlier. But it’s not shifting the number of kids they’re having in total.

That helps. We know it’s much easier for a 20-something woman to get pregnant and have a healthy baby then a woman in her 30s or even early 40s, but it’s not increasing the number of children.

Mike Moffatt: That totally makes sense to me. All of this just shows the complexity of this issue. Different policies impact different groups differently. It’s not one-size-fits-all.

We see that a lot when it comes to the relationship between home prices and fertility rates: we saw high and rising prices cause fertility to fall for young people who get priced out of family sized homes, but it also can cause fertility to rise for the cohort who already owned a home and the value rose sharply after they purchased it.

Cara Stern: That seems like one of those very obvious findings. If you own a home and you’re gaining wealth, you probably feel more settled and are ready to take on additional expenses. But of course if you’re worried about housing security, you don’t want to bring children into the mix.

Mike Moffatt: And this whole fertility rate discussion feels like all of our housing affordability discussions. There is no one single cause and also no single policy that will fix any of this.

Cara Stern: Which doesn’t mean that policy doesn’t matter because the research is still pretty clear that countries with good comprehensive packages do better then countries without them.

Mike Moffatt: So where does all of this leave us? We’ve got a rising bar for what ready to have kids means, childcare policies that work better for some people then for others, and cultural forces that even the best welfare states can’t fully counteract. So where do we go from here?

Cara Stern: It means it’s really complicated and there is no single lever. You have 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. It’s everything all at once, which is hard and an expensive way to approach this.

Mike Moffatt: Success shouldn’t be defined by a birth rate number, just like a successful housing system isn’t just about ownership rates. It’s about creating choice.

If people have real choices, I suspect they would have larger families and have their first child younger—but those are the outcomes, not the goals themselves. So in the end it’s not just about preferences but the rising societal and economic cost of raising a child matters.

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

Mike Moffatt: Now, I also think we need to be clear as a society about what we are try to accomplish here. I’m not sure how you see it, but in my mind success in not defined by a higher fertility rate or birth rate in the same way I don’t see a successful housing system as necessarily be one with higher rate of ownership.

I see a successful society is 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 are priced out of some options but they have free choices on how they live their lives.

Now I suspect in such a society, people would have larger family then they are having now. I suspect they would have a child at a younger age. I also suspect that home ownership rates would go up. But those, in my view, are outcome of attaining the goal of increased choice, but not the goals themselves.

Cara Stern: 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. They want to have this number of kids, but 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’s economy 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 the conversation on having kids, because we focus so much on the cost and the sacrifices, the lack of sleep, 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.

Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about the best Atari 2600 games to play after school, please email us at [email protected].

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.