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Birth rates are falling across much of the world. The obvious explanation is that people simply want fewer children. But intriguing new demographic research suggests something more complicated: among women who become mothers, family size has proved surprisingly resilient. The bigger change may be how many women become mothers at all.
There is a particular sentence that appears surprisingly often in conversations about having children.
“Someday.”
Someday, when the relationship is right.
Someday, when work settles down.
Someday, when there's enough money.
Someday, when the apartment has another bedroom.
Someday, when life feels slightly less like something being managed through a sequence of passwords, calendars and overdue bills.
For some women, someday arrives.
For others, it doesn't.
And somewhere between those two outcomes lies one of the most consequential demographic changes occurring across much of the developed world.
Birth rates have fallen dramatically.
Across OECD countries, the average total fertility rate fell from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022. Women are also having children later. The average age at childbirth across the OECD reached about 31 by 2022, while permanent childlessness has increased substantially in several countries.
These trends have generated increasingly anxious headlines about ageing populations, shrinking workforces and even “population collapse.”
But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking:
Why don't people want children anymore?
we might first ask:
How many people still want children—but aren't managing to have the families they imagined?
That question produces a rather different story.
One Number Can Hide Very Different Lives
Demographers commonly summarize fertility using the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR.
It is an extremely useful measure, but it compresses a complicated collection of human lives into one number.
A 2025 paper in Scientific Reports by independent researcher Stephen J. Shaw proposes separating that number into two components.
The first, which Shaw calls the Total Maternal Rate (TMR), is a period-based measure intended to capture entry into motherhood.
The second is Children per Mother (CPM)—family size among women who become mothers.
Shaw expresses their relationship simply:
TFR = TMR × CPM.
His analysis used national birth-order records from Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States, then extended the work across 29 additional higher-income economies.
And he found something striking.
The two components don't necessarily move together.
In the United States, for example, Shaw's measure of entry into motherhood declined sharply after 2008, while Children per Mother had generally been increasing since 1980.
France provides another example.
Between 2013 and 2023, Shaw reports that Children per Mother remained around 2.3 to 2.4, while his Total Maternal Rate fell from 85.0% to 72.8%.
The implication is intriguing.
Part of the fertility decline may not be explained simply by mothers having progressively smaller families.
It may also reflect fewer women becoming mothers.
Those are not the same phenomenon.
And they may not have the same causes.
But Does Childlessness Mean Not Wanting Children?
No.
And this distinction is crucial.
Some women know early in adulthood that motherhood isn't for them.
Others become uncertain.
Some change their minds.
Some want children but experience infertility.
Some never meet someone with whom they want to raise a child.
Some postpone motherhood and later discover that biology has imposed a deadline that careers, housing markets and relationships never had to acknowledge.
Others encounter illness, caring responsibilities, financial difficulties, relationship breakdown or simply a sequence of circumstances that never quite align.
All of those women eventually appear in demographic statistics.
But the statistic cannot tell us their stories.
Shaw explicitly acknowledges this limitation: aggregate birth data cannot distinguish voluntary childlessness from medically involuntary or circumstantial childlessness.
That means we should be very cautious about turning rising childlessness into a claim about what women want.
Fortunately, another large research effort has begun asking people directly.
When Researchers Asked People What They Actually Wanted
In 2025, the United Nations Population Fund, working with YouGov, surveyed approximately 14,000 people in 14 countries, collectively representing more than a third of the world's population.
The results complicate the idea that declining fertility is simply the result of people rejecting parenthood.
Nearly 20% of reproductive-age adults believed they would be unable to have the number of children they wanted.
Nearly one in four respondents had experienced a time when they wanted a child but felt unable to have one at their preferred time. Among that group, more than 40% ultimately had to forgo that desire.
And among respondents over 50—people for whom much of the uncertainty has already resolved—31% reported having fewer children than they ideally would have chosen, while 12% reported having more.
That doesn't mean everybody secretly wants a large family.
Far from it.
Attitudes toward parenthood really have changed. OECD research notes that adults increasingly find meaning outside parenthood and that remaining childless has become more socially accepted.
That increased freedom is important.
But it can coexist with another reality:
some people aren't having the children they actually wanted.
Life Keeps Saying “Not Yet”
Consider a hypothetical woman at 27.
She thinks she'd like two children.
Not immediately.
Someday.
At 29, work is precarious.
At 31, her relationship ends.
At 33, she meets someone.
At 34, they're deciding whether the relationship has a future.
At 35, housing is expensive and both careers are demanding.
At 36, they decide they're ready.
Perhaps everything works beautifully.
Perhaps it doesn't.
At no point did she decide:
“I don't want children.”
Life simply kept saying:
“Not yet.”
The problem with “not yet” is that human fertility isn't indefinitely negotiable.
A career can be restarted.
A house can be bought later.
A relationship can begin at 45.
Biology operates on its own timetable.
And that creates a peculiar mismatch in modern adulthood: many of the conditions people understandably want before having children—education, financial stability, a secure relationship, suitable housing—can take longer to establish than they once did.
Money Matters — But It Isn't Just Money
When UNFPA asked what stood between people and their desired families, economics loomed large.
Across the countries surveyed, 39% said financial limitations had affected or were likely to affect their ability to achieve their desired family size.
When financial circumstances, housing, job insecurity and childcare costs were considered together, the economic barrier was larger still.
OECD research reaches a broadly compatible conclusion.
Housing costs are negatively associated with fertility rates. Labour-market insecurity matters. Childcare costs matter. And young adults in many countries are taking longer to become financially independent and establish themselves in housing and employment.
A generation hasn't necessarily forgotten how babies are made.
It may simply have discovered how much bedrooms cost.
But money isn't the entire story.
Sometimes the Missing Piece Is Another Person
One of the quieter findings in the UNFPA research deserves considerably more attention.
Across the 14 countries surveyed, 14% cited the lack of a suitable partner as a factor affecting their ability to have the number of children they wanted. In the United States, the figure was 18%; in Thailand, 25%.
That matters because discussions about fertility often treat reproduction almost as an individual decision:
Do women want children?
But for many people, the real question is:
Do I want children with this person?
Those are very different questions.
Finding someone is relatively easy compared with finding someone with whom you are willing to undertake perhaps the most consequential collaborative project of your life.
A supportive partner isn't simply a route to conception.
She or he is potentially the person sharing night feeds, mortgage payments, school runs, illness, childcare, careers, aging parents and approximately 7,000 conversations beginning:
“Did you remember to…?”
Choosing carefully seems rather sensible.
The difficulty is that careful choices take time.
And Women Are Still Doing More of the Work
There is another reason the decision can look different from a woman's side of the table.
The cost of parenthood isn't distributed equally.
UNFPA found women were more likely than men to identify unequal domestic labor as interfering with their fertility goals. Its 2025 summary reports that 13% of women versus 8% of men cited unequal household labor as a factor.
OECD research similarly concludes that women's ability to combine employment and parenthood—and men's willingness to share care and domestic work—matters to fertility.
Interestingly, the old assumption that women's employment inevitably suppresses fertility no longer works particularly well across developed countries.
Where women can participate in economic life while also having realistic support for family life, employment and fertility can coexist more successfully.
That provides another small piece of the silver lining.
The answer isn't necessarily asking women to retreat from the opportunities they gained.
It may be making parenthood more compatible with those opportunities.
The Future Has to Feel Livable Too
People don't make decisions about children using spreadsheets alone.
They also imagine a future.
And lately the future has been rather noisy.
Pandemics.
Wars.
Climate anxiety.
Political instability.
Housing crises.
Inflation.
Economic uncertainty.
The UNFPA survey found nearly one in five respondents said worries about the future—including war, pandemics, climate change and environmental deterioration—had caused or could cause them to have fewer children than desired.
OECD researchers similarly suggest that repeated global crises may increase feelings of uncertainty and unpredictability, contributing to delayed or forgone parenthood.
That doesn't mean reading less news will produce a baby boom.
But it does suggest something psychologically understandable.
Having a child is an unusually optimistic act.
It asks someone to imagine not merely next year, but decades ahead.
Perhaps fertility therefore responds not only to what life costs, but to how the future feels.
Economic Shocks Leave Interesting Footprints
This is one of the more provocative parts of Shaw's paper.
He finds abrupt changes in entry into motherhood around periods of major economic disruption.
The United States shows a sharp decline around the 2008 financial crisis. Italy, Japan and the UK show striking changes around the economic turmoil of the early 1970s.
His Japanese analysis is particularly arresting.
All 47 Japanese prefectures showed declining entry into motherhood between 1974 and 1975. Shaw's more detailed monthly analysis found statistical breakpoints clustering after the 1973 oil shock.
But here we need an important scientific brake.
This is not proof that the oil shock caused decades of subsequent childlessness.
Shaw himself doesn't claim that.
Birth timing creates major complications in fertility statistics. People can postpone children rather than permanently forgo them, and Shaw acknowledges that his own period measures are vulnerable to these “tempo effects.”
Still, the pattern fits a broader body of evidence suggesting that economic insecurity can influence when people feel able to start families.
Perhaps uncertainty doesn't always make people say no.
Sometimes it makes them say:
“Let's wait another year.”
Enough additional years, however, can eventually matter.
So Is There a Silver Lining?
There is.
But it isn't:
Don't worry. Birth rates will bounce back.
We don't know that.
OECD researchers explicitly caution that even supportive family policies are unlikely by themselves to return many countries to replacement-level fertility.
Nor should society's objective be persuading every woman to become a mother.
A woman who freely chooses a life without children hasn't failed to fulfil a demographic obligation.
Her life isn't a missing data point waiting to be corrected.
The hopeful finding is different.
Some of the gap appears to be between the families people want and the families circumstances allow them to have.
And circumstances aren't necessarily immutable.
Some Things Can Be Changed
Housing isn't a biological constant.
Neither are childcare costs.
Parental leave isn't dictated by nature.
Workplace flexibility isn't encoded in human DNA.
The division of household labor isn't governed by Newton's laws.
Access to reproductive and fertility healthcare can improve.
And communities can become less isolating places in which to meet, form relationships and raise children.
OECD evidence suggests that affordable childcare, paid parental leave, greater gender equality and work-family compatibility can all help create conditions more favorable to family formation, although none offers a simple demographic cure.
UNFPA reaches a similarly important conclusion from a different direction.
Rather than setting fertility targets or trying to pressure people into having more children, it argues that policy should increase people's ability to have the families they themselves want—including the freedom to have children, fewer children, or none.
That strikes us as a much more humane objective.
What Can an Individual Woman Actually Do?
Population policy isn't particularly useful when you're sitting at a kitchen table wondering about your own life.
So what does this research offer an individual woman?
Not a formula.
But perhaps a few questions worth asking earlier than we sometimes do.
If having children matters deeply to you, it may be useful to distinguish between:
“Someday” and “important.”
Someday requires no plan.
Important things usually do.
That doesn't mean panicking at 28, settling for the wrong relationship or reorganizing a life around a fertility statistic.
It means being honest with yourself.
Do I actually want children?
If I do, how important is that desire compared with the other things I want?
What assumptions am I making about how much time I have?
Am I waiting for something genuinely necessary—or for a version of adulthood in which everything is finally perfect?
If I'm in a relationship, do we want the same future?
If we want children, have we actually discussed when?
These can be uncomfortable conversations.
They may also be kinder than discovering years later that two people had been using the word “someday” to mean completely different things.
Perfect May Be the Enemy of Possible
Modern parenthood can arrive with an extraordinary prerequisite list.
A stable career.
The right house.
Savings.
Travel completed.
Relationship perfected.
Emotional maturity achieved.
Kitchen renovated.
Possibly matching storage containers.
There is nothing foolish about wanting stability before bringing another human being into the world.
But there may be value in asking what constitutes enough.
People throughout history have raised children amid imperfect circumstances.
That doesn't mean hardship should be romanticized.
It means perfection is a demanding admission requirement for ordinary human life.
There may never be a moment when everything is finished, secure and certain.
Sometimes adulthood simply becomes sufficiently workable.
Recognizing that distinction is personal—not demographic.
And If Motherhood Doesn't Happen?
This matters just as much.
An article about unrealized fertility can easily make women who are childless feel as though their lives are being discussed as a social tragedy.
That would be both unfair and wrong.
Some women never wanted children and live exactly the lives they chose.
Some once wanted children and later discovered that they didn't.
Some couldn't have them.
Some never found the right relationship.
Some tried for years.
Some experienced losses nobody around them fully understood.
Some constructed lives filled with friendship, work, nieces and nephews, creativity, community, love, mentorship, travel, caregiving and purpose.
A life without children isn't an incomplete version of a life with them.
But neither should we pretend that involuntary childlessness carries no grief.
Both truths can coexist.
Respecting reproductive choice means respecting the woman who never wanted motherhood.
It also means taking seriously the woman who did.
Perhaps We Need Better Conversations Earlier
This may be the most practical lesson of all.
Fertility is often discussed either clinically or politically.
Perhaps it also needs to be discussed socially.
Among friends.
Between partners.
Between mothers and daughters.
Between women of different generations.
Not as pressure.
Not:
“When are you going to give me grandchildren?”
That question has probably never improved a family gathering.
But rather:
“What kind of life do you imagine for yourself?”
Women who have already lived through these decisions possess something younger women don't yet have:
hindsight.
A 25-year-old knows things a 60-year-old has forgotten.
But a 60-year-old also knows which decisions turned out to be reversible—and which didn't.
That doesn't give older women the right to prescribe younger women's lives.
It does give generations something worth talking about.
And perhaps those conversations should include men as well.
Parenthood may occur in a woman's body, but creating a family is rarely only women's business.
What Shaw's Research Changes
Stephen Shaw's paper doesn't prove why fertility is declining.
His Microdemographic Framework is new, and it should be tested, challenged and replicated by other demographers.
His claim that conventional TFR loses substantial information when it combines entry into motherhood with family size is based on his particular analytical framework and should not yet be treated as demographic orthodoxy.
But he asks a valuable question.
What happens when we stop treating all falling fertility as the same phenomenon?
His data suggest that family size among mothers can remain relatively stable even while fewer women enter motherhood.
UNFPA then gives us another piece of the puzzle:
substantial numbers of people report that their actual or expected family size is smaller than they wanted.
OECD research supplies still another:
housing, employment, childcare, gender equality, economic security and work-family compatibility can influence fertility decisions.
None proves the others.
Together, however, they suggest that the story behind declining fertility is considerably more complicated than:
People don't want children anymore.
Lydia's™ Take
Demography has a peculiar way of making intensely personal lives look impersonal.
A fertility rate falls from 1.8 to 1.6.
A graph slopes downward.
A government worries about pensions.
An economist calculates the future workforce.
But somewhere inside that decimal point is a woman.
Perhaps she never wanted children.
Perhaps she wanted one and had one.
Perhaps she wanted three and happily stopped at two.
Perhaps she spent years trying to become pregnant.
Perhaps she always assumed motherhood would happen eventually, until eventually disappeared.
Perhaps she met the love of her life at 42.
Perhaps she became a mother at 39 and still occasionally looks across the breakfast table wondering how this noisy little person got there.
Statistics need all of these women.
But statistics cannot tell us what their lives meant.
That may be the most useful lesson from the fertility debate.
The goal shouldn't be to produce more babies for an economy.
Nor should women carry responsibility for repairing a country's age structure.
A more humane ambition is much simpler:
give people the best possible chance to build the families they actually want.
That means respecting the woman who chooses not to have children.
Supporting the woman who does.
Making parenthood more compatible with work rather than demanding women choose between them.
Making fathers genuine partners.
Taking fertility and reproductive health seriously without frightening younger women.
Making housing and childcare less formidable.
And perhaps creating a culture in which people can talk about these decisions honestly before “someday” has quietly become yesterday.
There are no guarantees.
Birth rates may remain low.
Societies may need to adapt to smaller younger generations and larger older ones. OECD researchers explicitly recommend preparing for that possibility rather than assuming fertility policy will reverse it.
But there is a silver lining.
The desire to love, care for and build a family may be more resilient than some of the demographic headlines imply.
The difficulty may lie partly in turning that desire into a life.
And if some of the obstacles were created by the way we organize housing, work, childcare, relationships and family life, then at least some of them can be changed.
We cannot promise anyone the family she imagined.
But perhaps we can build a world in which fewer people look back and think:
I wanted that life. Somehow, I just never found the right moment to begin it.
Editorial Note
This article discusses demographic research and population-level patterns. Decisions about whether and when to have children are deeply personal and may be influenced by relationships, health, fertility, finances, culture and individual preference. Population statistics cannot determine what is right for any individual woman or family.
Fertility also changes with age, but individual reproductive circumstances vary substantially. Anyone with questions about her own fertility or reproductive timeline should discuss them with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional rather than relying on population statistics or general editorial information.
Research & Trusted Sources
Shaw, S. J. (2025). “On a microdemographic framework for decomposing contemporary fertility dynamics.” Scientific Reports, 15, 30726.
The paper that prompted this article. Shaw proposes decomposing Total Fertility Rate into period measures of entry into motherhood and Children per Mother. His analysis covers national data from four countries and validation across 29 additional higher-income economies. The framework is novel and should be interpreted as a proposed analytical approach rather than established demographic consensus.
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). (2025). State of World Population 2025: The Real Fertility Crisis — The Pursuit of Reproductive Agency in a Changing World.
Based partly on a UNFPA/YouGov survey of approximately 14,000 people across 14 countries. Nearly 20% of reproductive-age respondents expected not to achieve their desired number of children; 39% identified financial constraints as affecting desired family size, while partnership, health, gender inequality and fears about the future also emerged as barriers.
UNFPA State of World Population 2025
OECD. (2024). Society at a Glance 2024: OECD Social Indicators.
Provides the broader demographic context and reviews evidence concerning fertility, housing, employment, childcare, family policy, gender equality and economic insecurity. The OECD cautions that supportive policies can improve conditions for family formation but are unlikely, by themselves, to restore replacement-level fertility across low-fertility countries.
OECD. (2024). “Fertility trends across the OECD: Underlying drivers and the role for policy.”
Detailed review of the evidence concerning changing fertility preferences, delayed parenthood, work-family reconciliation, housing costs, childcare, parental leave, employment and the distribution of caregiving between women and men.