Texas could be a lifeline in baby bust
Businesses in the state could do more to raise birth rates
My two oldest daughters have recently entered the workforce. One is pursuing her dream career in social services, while the other has landed happily in a high-stakes tech job in Silicon Valley. As dissimilar as their work lives will be, they’ve both received, over and over, the same career advice: Put off children, or don’t have them at all. So far, both are heeding this counsel, but for very different reasons. One because of the staggering financial cost of raising children, the other because of a 24/7 workplace culture.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Parents need more support, and fast. If we don’t reorient society to provide it, even Texas won’t be able to import enough people to keep its population growing — or even stable.
As the U.S. searches for its new normal in a not-quite-post-pandemic world, much attention has been paid to the dual crises of labor shortages and women’s exodus from the workforce. We ought to be devoting similar thought to an equally pressing and indisputably related problem: our nation’s declining fertility rate and what we’re doing — or not doing — to reverse it.
The U.S. birthrate is at an alltime low, with the pandemic exacerbating a downward trend. Fertility rates declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and the birthrate for women in their 20s has fallen by 28 percent since its recent peak in 2007.
Americans are having fewer children than the minimum of 2 needed to maintain a steady population, a pattern that is expected to remain true for the foreseeable future. In 1950, women had, on average, 3 children. Today women have, on average, around 1.8.
In Texas, the birth rate is declining even faster than the national average, according to recent data, raising concerns among demographers and economists that the state will see significant labor shortages in the next two decades. While Texas is still the fastest growing state in the nation, that growth largely stems from net migration from other states — namely California, New York, Illinois and Florida — and other countries, including Mexico, China and India.
Immigration alone won’t be enough to offset the declining birth rate, Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, recently told the Dallas Morning News. “Immigration is never going to be the answer,” Orrenius said. “It can be part of the answer.”
For now, Texas’ low birth rate means fewer people buying homes and stocks, fewer nurses and inhome caregivers, fewer taxpayers to fund Social Security and Medicare. In Italy, rapid drops in fertility have led to closing hospitals and schools.
The cost of babies
Parenting has always been difficult but if you hear a young person complaining about how it's gotten harder, believe them. Consider this: as of 2018, the cost of child care had already increased by 65 percent since the early 1980s and now costs more than college tuition or a monthly mortgage in many states.
It's hardly surprising that my daughters are putting off having children. Young people don't want to have children in a country that leaves parents of young children utterly alone to navigate this cost.
A national poll conducted by Morning Consult for the New York Times found that about a quarter of respondents who had children or planned to have children said they had fewer or expected to have fewer than they wanted. The largest shares said they delayed or stopped having children because of concerns about having enough time or money.
.
Further complicating matters, both work and parenting have become more demanding in recent years, making it more difficult than ever to balance the two. American parents spend more money and time on their children than any previous generation. Since the 1980s, the number of hours that parents spend on child care has risen, especially for college-educated parents, for whom it has doubled. In parallel, it has become increasingly expensive to pay for center-based child care providers. During the pandemic alone, the average price for child care center services in Texas increased by over 50 percent.
It all takes a toll. Studies consistently reveal that parents are, on average, less happy than non-parents. When researchers looked at the happiness differential in close to two dozen countries, they found the United States has the biggest happiness gap between parents and non-parents. University of Texas sociology professor Jennifer Glass, who led the research, found the gap was entirely explained by the absence of social policies allowing parents to more easily combine paid work with family obligations.
Of course, a drop in unintended pregnancies and an increase in women's autonomy also contributes to the overall decline in births. We can simultaneously celebrate these advances while taking steps to ensure that women and men who want to have children feel they can do so — without sabotaging their emotional or financial well-being in the process.
Go big for babies
Government certainly has a role to turn the baby bust around but that won't be enough. It will take businesses leading the way. A number of European countries have introduced government incentives to increase birth rates, but few appear to be moving the needle. Italy's fertility rate remains one of the lowest in the European Union — 1.24 children per woman — despite a program launched in 2015 that pays couples a generous stipend per birth.
Perhaps what we need to learn from Europeans is to make a stronger business case for addressing the baby bust.
Much has changed in the five decades since Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago professor like me, wrote his enormously influential New York Times essay arguing that “the business of business is business” — that a company's sole responsibility is to return profits to its shareholders.
Our best path forward is a reorienting of society — especially at work — around support for parents. Texas, with its population heft, its business acumen and its willingness to think big, could lead the way in reversing this trend.
Platitudes about familyfriendliness aren't enough. Not when 77 percent of Americans working in the private sector lack paid parental leave and 1 in 4 mothers return to work 10-14 days after giving birth. Not when two-thirds of children under 6 live in homes where all parents work, and the U.S. is the only country among 41 nations that doesn't mandate any paid leave for new parents, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Our policymakers and business leaders lament the current labor shortages, but they're doing little to usher in the social infrastructure necessary for parents to work: accessible, and high-quality child care, portable worker benefits, robust parental leave policies, and universal pre-kindergarten.
It's past time for us to recognize parents for what they are: the guardians of our future well-being and prosperity. And we must help them in that critical endeavor. That means engaging business leaders as well as policymakers in the quest to get parents the support they need and deserve.
First, the government must invest more in families and ensure parents have real choice when it comes to child-rearing. Parents who want to work outside the home should be able to, secure in the knowledge that their children will be cared for at an affordable, high-quality center. And parents who want to stay home should be able to, secure in their ability to cover their bills while they do the important work of bonding and building their child's brain in those early weeks and months.
Second, the private sector must adopt family-friendly policies and a culture that encourages workers to use them. I'm encouraged by early signs pointing toward businesses seeking and adopting ways to be allies for employees and their families.
Kendra Scott, an Austinbased jewelry line now worth over one billion dollars, is a perfect example. Scott established a thoroughly “family-first” company culture, offering parental leave to everyone, including part-time employees; fertility and adoption assistance; and generous paid time off.
Scott even established a family fund, supported by employee donations and by Scott herself, to help workers facing unforeseen financial hardship — a home damaged in a hurricane, a family member with a sudden illness or injury. And because life happens in smaller ways as well, Scott's company also instituted a “pass-the-baby” policy. Babysitter sick? Child care center closed? No problem. Just bring your child to work. And starting this year, Kendra Scott is even making Mother's Day a paid company holiday.
More and more companies are getting the memo. I'm honored to be speaking at the Best Place For Working Parents Summit in Fort Worth in early May, where business leaders from across the country will gather to discuss what it means to be family-friendly, through workplace policies that benefit working parents and businesses alike.
I believe there's a way to interpret Friedman's assessment of corporate responsibility that backs up more support for parents. A firm's bottom line depends on both near-term and long-term profits. When a farmer fertilizes his crop in the spring, it raises costs and lowers profits in that quarter, but fertilizing ensures a plentiful harvest — and profits — in the fall.
A literal interpretation of Friedman's focus on profits would call for a re-investment in today's family, not a further de-investment. And while such investments should center and celebrate parents, they shouldn't fall solely on parents to fund and maintain.
As a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, there is no greater joy than snuggling against my little patients as I walk them to the operating room — something I take extra delight in now that my own children, all eight of them, tower over me.
My husband and I are raising four daughters and four sons. The potential for a gaggle of grandchildren for me to snuggle against one day seems imminently promising, but we still need to assure young people that parenting is not just noble, but doable. I hope my oldest daughters and the rest of my children — indeed, all young people — can soon look around and see that society stands ready to support and celebrate them in one of life's greatest endeavors.
When it comes to helping America and its children meet their full promise, it doesn't just take a village: It takes a nation.
Dana Suskind is professor of surgery, pediatrics and public policy (affiliated) and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago, and author of the forthcoming book “Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential, Fulfilling Society's Promise.”