U.S. ENTERING NO-KID ZONE
Data shows Orange, L.A. counties had 31% fewer children in 2020 than in 2000, with trend expected to continue
If the demographic flipside of America's rapidly aging population is a baby bust — a cycle of fewer and fewer kids born into an ever-shrinking pool of families interested in having any kids at all — then the sound of that bust might best be described as:
“Quiet,” said Angelina Gonzales, 39, who runs a small day care service out of her home in a Santa Ana neighborhood near the Willowick Golf Course. “I mean, it's not quiet, quiet. Kids are still noisy. But it's not like when I was growing up. That was noisy.”
Gonzales, born in Tonola, Mexico, as the fourth of six children, laughed as she added: “My brothers, they could scream.”
But, these days, at her day care, the screaming is done by the few, not necessarily the loud.
“Maybe if I marry somebody rich enough to pay off my loans then, yeah, it would be great. If not, then, no. I can't see myself having any kids . ... I'm joking about the husband thing; I'm perfectly capable of paying my own bills. But I can't do that and provide for a child, at least not yet.”
— Kelly Choi, 31, of Century City
A decade ago, when she started making money looking after neighborhood kids, Gonzales had seven children in her charge. This year she's down to three, not including her own daughter — an only child — who is 11 and spends much of the day at school.
What's more, two of the three kids Gonzales watches are slated to start preschool a year from now. After that, she said, she'll probably have to switch jobs.
“There aren't any more kids left in the neighborhood.”
That's true for a lot of neighborhoods.
Demographers and census data show that a worldwide slowdown in births started hitting the United States hard during the 2008 recession and hasn't really let up. Nationally, the U.S. had fewer kids in 2020 than it had in 2010, according to census data released earlier this year. And in higher-income, high-priced housing markets such as Southern California, the birth slowdown has been particularly sharp.
The drop in kids is half the equation driving the broader aging boom, the trend in which the populations of virtually every advanced economy on Earth are getting older at an almost comical rate. Last year, the median age in the United States hit 38.9 years, a year and a half older than in 2010 (37.2), and a full six years older than it was in 1990 (32.9). In countries as diverse as Japan and Germany, the median age is creeping closer to 50.
One reason for all that aging is we’re living longer. The life expectancy rate for people who reach the age of 65 has nearly doubled in the past half-century, meaning vast pools of retirees now live longer and healthier than ever before.
But the other factor — a reason that people are only just starting to look at — is that we’re having so few kids.
That trend, according to demographers and others, is only just getting started.
“I’m not going to have any more, but I hope my daughter has a big family someday,” Gonzales said. “I love kids.”
Santa Ana is one of hundreds of cities around the country where kids are a shrinking part of the total population.
From 2010 through 2020, the number of Santa Ana residents younger than 18 fell by about 23%, according to census data. That was the nation’s second-biggest child population decline, trailing only Louisville, Kentucky, which saw its kid population fall by 37%. It was also part of a Southern California trend; Long Beach (down 17%), Anaheim (15%) and Los Angeles (14%) also were among the national top 10 in terms of cities that lost the most children.
Overall, from 2010 to 2020, America’s child population fell by about 1.4%, or 1.1 million, to 73.1 million. Generally, the census data showed that kid population declines in big cities were not quite offset by rising kid populations in many rural areas.
As demographic trends go, this one isn’t rare or particularly unexpected. Children have been a shrinking part of America’s population since at least 1900.
But unlike previous baby busts — periods when birth rates fell for a decade or so — demographers do not expect a baby bounce back any time soon. Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that in the early 2030s the U.S. will have more older people (age 65 and up) than it has children (younger than 18) — a first in national history — but bringing us in line with some of the oldest countries on Earth. After that, demographers expect the nation’s child population to hold virtually flat for most of the next 30-plus years.
Still, for all the number crunching that makes population growth projectable (based on factors such as ages of the current population, fertility rates and the likely future death rate) the prospect of a sustained run of people having no kids sparks more questions than solid answers.
In fact, a lot of different people and industries are looking at how society will change as America ages up, tracking everything from labor markets to the best age to be a swimsuit model. But fewer people are looking at how America will function when it has a much smaller pool of kids. Beyond the hard numbers associated with such things as taxes, Social Security and Medicare, questions about fewer babies touch on everything from family dynamics to our collective sense of what is or isn’t fair.
Dowell Myers, a demographer and professor at USC’S Sol Price School of Public Policy who studies aging trends, said for several decades his work has been based on a U.S. population model with a lot of kids and only a few oldsters. For at least the next few decades, he said, that premise is likely to be reversed.
“It’s a little eerie,” he said. Federal data released last month showed that the national child poverty rate nearly doubled in 2022, to about 12.4%. The shift was a statistical outlier, in part because it reflected the pullback of temporary breaks aimed at helping families with little kids get through the COVID-19 pandemic.
With those tax breaks in place, child poverty fell to about 6%. But when Congress chose to let those tax breaks lapse, the number of kids living in homes where incomes are below the poverty line jumped to slightly more than what it had been prior to the pandemic.
Some suggested the episode illustrates the power of smart government spending. Others said it was no such thing, and that the cost of those tax breaks was unsustainable.
But demographers suggested the episode could be a harbinger of how America will function over the next few decades.
Kids don’t vote. Older people do. And while that’s always been so, of course, it’s possible — maybe even likely — that over the next few decades financially strained older Americans will be tempted to exercise their increasing political clout at the expense of younger Americans. Demographic projections suggest they’ll definitely have the numerical advantage, even when taking into account parents of young children, a group that presumably might vote in their children’s interests.
For many of the opinion writers who weighed in on the child poverty episode, the issue was about fairness, either the fairness of casting children into poverty or the unfairness of being expected to finance other people’s children.
For demographer Myers, among others, any questions related to supporting a shrinking pool of American kids should focus less on right and wrong and more on math.
“It’s stupid to let kids become poor,” Myers said. “Stupid from the standpoint that it hurts older people at least as much, if not more than it hurts the younger people.”
Projected aging trends — more older people and fewer younger ones — will strain the ratio of workingage taxpayers to the exploding number of retirees. In the second half of the 20th century, Myers said there were roughly 24 retired Americans for every 100 workers. But by 2040, he projects that retiree number will double, to 48, while the number of workers will remain flat.
As a result, Myers calculates that Americans born after 1985 are “twice as important as people born before that year,” at least when measuring their contribution to the tax pool that supports Social Security, Medicare and other programs that help older people.
“Kids are expensive, and that’s especially true when you’re talking about other people’s kids,” Myers said.
But, Myers said, the cost of letting kids slip into poverty raises the odds that those children won’t be important taxpayers and producers when they become adults. During periods when the population provides a huge pool of children, letting some slip through the cracks might not mean much for the overall tax pool.
But in a world where there are comparatively fewer children positioned to become working-age adult taxpayers, the cost of letting some slip into poverty, or to launch their careers without a strong education or vocational training, might eventually rebound on the older people they might — or might not — be supporting.
How older people treat the shrinking pool of children in the population has big implications for what Myers described as America’s “social deal.”
“Look, we can fight about a lot of things, but we can all agree that in 20 years most of the people who are 55 today will be retired and most of the people who are 10 will be 30 and at the start of their careers,” he said. “It’s going to be critical for older people to set aside short-term benefits to support younger people. That’s also part of the social deal.”
For decades, demographers and others worried about too many babies. China, India and many countries in Africa all were said to be growing at rates deemed unsustainable for the environment and beyond the planet’s capacity to produce enough food for all.
Those factors aren’t going away, but the population boom seems to be. Most people on Earth now live in countries where the birth rate is less than 2.1 kids per woman, the ratio that demographers describe as “replacement level” for any given population.
As a result, demographers now project the world population will peak between 2060 and 2080, at about 10 billion people, and begin a potentially longterm decline that could last for decades.
Birth trends in Southern California suggest natural population growth already has peaked.
When measuring only the youngest age cohort — from birth to the day before a fifth birthday — the combined Los Angeles/long Beach/orange County region saw an outright drop of about 31% since the turn of the century, according to census data. In the Inland Empire, that same age group grew, but only by about 4%.
The state forecasts a lot more of the same. Between 2023 and 2060, the California Department of Finance projects that the birth-to-5 crowd will shrink in Riverside County (by 20.6%), Los Angeles County (15.6%) and San Bernardino County (10.4%).
It’s unclear if declining population numbers are happening fast enough to help the environment much or change the food supply. What is clear is that the factors prompting people to opt out of parenthood aren’t going away.
Last year, a Harris poll found that about half (52%) of young couples who don’t have children have no plans to have any, and that 1 in 5 are on the fence.
When asked to list all of the reasons why they don’t want kids, a little more than a quarter (28%) mentioned climate change or other environmental problems, while about a third pointed to trends in American politics (31%) and housing prices (33%) and other financial considerations.
Statistically, most of the people making that choice are millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and a key reason they’re not having kids is money. Prepandemic studies of that group’s financial state show they’re carrying more debt than any previous generational cohort, roughly $1 trillion, according to federal data.
But those same studies also found that, on average, millennials save more for retirement and spend less on credit cards than their parents or grandparents did at the same age. Instead, student loans, which account for more than $300 billion in millennial debt, remain a lifelong burden for many.
That, in turn, has put a damper on having kids.
“Maybe if I marry somebody rich enough to pay off my loans then, yeah, it would be great,” said Kelly Choi, 31, of Century City. “If not, then, no. I can’t see myself having any kids.”
Though Choi wouldn’t say how much she still owes on loans she took out to complete her undergraduate and graduate degrees from UCLA, she did say the payments, which restarted in the past two months, are likely to continue until she’s in her late 40s.
“I’m joking about the husband thing; I’m perfectly capable of paying my own bills,” Choi said. “But I can’t do that and provide for a child, at least not yet.”
But there’s another factor in play: opportunity.
In last year’s Harris poll on why people aren’t having kids, the only answer that drew a majority (54%) was broadly listed as “personal freedom,” the ability to study, travel and build a career without the responsibility of raising children.
Gonzales, the day care operator in Santa Ana, said she chose to stop at one child specifically so she could get an education and make more money.
When she started her day care, which she launched a few months after her daughter was born, Gonzales didn’t have a college degree. Since then, she’s been taking classes in marketing and accounting and now is close to having a degree. Her long-term plan is to become a CPA, even if it means entering the profession in her 40s.
“My mother didn’t finish high school because she had six kids,” Gonzales said. “I know she loved us. I know she didn’t regret it. But I also know I didn’t want to do the same thing. No way.
“That’s why my daughter is the only child we’ll have. … I think.”