By Karen Benjamin Guzzo

Copyright newsweek

A “Manhattan Project” to raise birth rates? That’s the latest effort from the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025. Despite evidence that “depopulation” is neither imminent nor devastating, worries about an impending population collapse are fueling efforts to address record-low birth rates in the U.S. Many commentators blame people—usually women—for being selfish and rejecting parenthood.But these opinions miss the mark when it comes to understanding today’s low birth rates.It’s not that people are rejecting parenthood or deciding never to have another child. In fact, people’s general ideas about the ideal number of children to have are at an all-time high. Instead, it seems people are waiting longer to have a child, and in some cases, not having any children. And even among those who have children, waiting longer to become parents could mean having fewer children than they initially wanted.The real reason people are postponing becoming parents or having another child stems from the fact that, compared to earlier generations, fewer of today’s young adults have hit the major milestones of adulthood, like finishing school, living on their own, and finding stable jobs. These shifts are because of changes in the economy, as the value of the minimum wage has fallen, more jobs require higher education credentials while the cost of college has increased, and housing affordability has declined. Addressing these concerns is essential if U.S. policymakers want to increase birth rates.As people wait to achieve the key markers of adulthood, they’re also waiting longer to marry, and in some cases, not doing so at all. In the U.S., as in other countries, people tend to believe that serious relationships, especially marriage, shouldn’t happen until you’ve achieved some degree of economic success. And because raising children within marriage remains more socially acceptable than single parenthood, some of the shifts in childbearing are due to changes in relationship patterns.But it goes even deeper than that. Fundamentally, having a child is making a decision about the future. It’s a long-term commitment—and it seems future generations will face more challenges than their parents as they save for the future, pay for college, and buy a house. Perhaps unsurprisingly, today’s parents are particularly concerned about their children’s financial futures as well as their children’s mental health, bullying, and violence.When men and women don’t feel good about their circumstances, and aren’t optimistic their (or their potential children’s) future will be better, they tend to decide against having a child at that moment, as my research shows.In one study of cohabiting and married people who wanted a child, or remained open to having one, my coauthors and I found that the most stressed people were less likely to plan to have a child in the next year, citing economic worries and concerns about the future. This was true even when we accounted for objective factors like income, economic hardships, and education. That is, despite their actual financial situation, how people felt about their finances and future was important in whether they decided that now was the right time to have a child.Another study, using different data, considered how important people thought it was to avoid getting pregnant at the time of the survey. Here, we found that those who were more pessimistic about their economic futures—regarding standard of living, enough money, or a dead-end job—were much more likely to report that it was very important to avoid pregnancy. Again, this was true even when we accounted for things like income, homeownership, and economic hardship.Such results might explain why other work I’ve done finds that even though people still plan to have children, they’re less certain about whether those plans will happen and are increasingly OK if they don’t. In other words, people aren’t rejecting parenthood—they are hedging their bets about whether they’ll be able to reach a point in their lives where having children seems feasible.This is why the proposed ideas for raising birth rates—savings accounts for newborns, new (and unproven) approaches to reproductive medicine, discouraging education by making it harder to pay for college and graduate or professional school—aren’t likely to make much of a difference: They don’t address the underlying issues.People need to feel secure in their lives and confident in their futures—that they’ll have the resources to set their potential children up for success without derailing their own lives. Helping people achieve their childbearing goals means coming up with holistic solutions that improve people’s lives, such as making housing more affordable and tackling student loan debt. We must ensure people have good jobs, with benefits, protections, and wages.Karen Benjamin Guzzo is a sociologist and demographer who serves as the director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.