Baby Bust | Stewart Friedman

Why Is the Birthrate Declining?

Dan Loney: The decision to start a family has become more challenging in the last decade or so as younger generations are considering what is best for their lives. With the birthrate on the decline, what are the impacts of these decisions? It’s a pleasure to be joined in studio by Stew Friedman, who’s the founding director of the Work/Life Integration Project here at the Wharton School. He is also author of the book Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family.

Stew, this book is a 10th anniversary edition. Let’s start there, with obviously the importance of doing the first edition. But why you think it’s important to bring it back now?

Stew Friedman: The first edition, 2012-2013, was based on the findings of a study we did here at the Wharton School, the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, which I founded in 1991. One of the things we did with that project was to survey Wharton students and alumni in depth as to their values, beliefs, hopes, and aspirations for their careers and for the rest of their lives. We had the opportunity in 2012 to compare the responses of people from the class of 1990 — the Gen Xers — with the millennials, the class of 2012. So, we had a true longitudinal comparison of 22-year-olds, both graduating from the same place, as opposed to a lot of the other studies that compare generations that ask 22-year-olds a set of questions, and then they ask 42-year-olds a set of questions. What you’re getting there has a lot to do with the difference between being 22 and being 42. Here, we had a true cross-generational study, which was unique.

What was so startling about my initial take on what we saw in our data — this is hundreds and hundreds of people from both classes, men and women — was the response to the question, do you plan to have or adopt children? “Yes,” “probably,” “not sure,” “probably not,” and “no” were the response alternatives. In 1992, it was 78-79% “probably” or “yes” for men and women. And in 2012, it was 42%.

Loney: Significant difference.

Friedman: Staggering. I just thought, “No, that can’t be right.” But it was. That became the central focus of this cross-generational study: Why is this? That’s what we were exploring in the initial monograph of the book, about the different generations and the different reasons for why men and women were less likely to plan to have or adopt kids.

Well, 10 years later, Wharton Press thought, “Well, let’s look at this again.” Because this issue has just gotten bigger with respect to how people think about working the rest of their lives, and particularly about the creation and care of the next generation. So much happened in the intervening decade, including and especially the pandemic. But also huge economic shifts, changes in attitudes particularly about religion.

We produced a new version that has an update with respect to how things have changed, with a special focus on how the means by which work and life fit together is now radically different, not only because of people working from home more, often as a result of the humongous jolt that that the pandemic brought, but also the digital revolution and the tools we have now to be able to communicate anywhere, anytime. And how that has changed how people experience the relationship between work and family life.

Loney: Part of this also plays into the work that you’ve done around work/life balance and how people try to do this with the ever-increasing level of stuff that we have in our lives. There are challenges of trying to balance that and not fall into the deep end of the pool.

Friedman: Yeah. It’s really tough now, and it’s gotten tougher. There are signs of hope that I observe just thinking about the last decade, but also in the 2012-2013 version. The main one being that young men and women are more alike now than they were when we started this study 30 years ago, in terms of their thinking about what a modern working parent partnership looks like. They’re more similar in their attitudes. They become closer in how they think about what they would expect of their partners. That’s a good thing. And it creates, within a family or a parenting partnership, the ground for smarter choices, fairer choices.

But there’s still so much that needs to be done to create change. And people are struggling for lots of different reasons that have to do with social policy, organizational practice, the capacities that individuals have to be able to figure these very complex puzzles out. On all fronts, there are things that are happening that are intended to make it easier for people who choose to become parents to enable them to do that. To empower them to do that. But there’s also a lot of resistance on all fronts. It’s an ongoing issue, and one that I think there’s just more and more expressed pain about.

It’s become more of a national point of focus for both men and women — and for grandparents. I am now one, that’s another thing that’s happened since the first publication in 2012-2013, I’ve become a grandparent, so I have a new perspective personally on what these issues mean. Part of this is how people are dealing with their work, but also how work is dealing with them, in being able to maybe work with them a little bit better to understand some of these issues that people are going through, so they have more flexibility to work from home. That’s a dynamic that if you go back to 1992, we really didn’t have a lot of that in the mix.

But between ‘92 and 2012, we saw some shifts, particularly as the digital revolution was upon us, and people were figuring out how they could work more flexibly because of that. For other reasons as well, as companies were responding to an increasing demand by men and women to have more flexibility, that voice was being expressed more.

But the pandemic just changed everything. As we started living Zoom life and started to actually see on the screen people and animals behind you as you’re speaking. And recognizing that the boundary between your work identity and the other parts of your life, particularly in your home life, was something that needed to be much more consciously managed. But it also brought the greater recognition that, “Wow, there is this person’s life and I can see it.” Perhaps we as a company ought to be taking greater account for that other part of life and to invest in employees’ capability and being able to manage the different dynamics, intentions, and boundaries so that they can be more fully present when they are engaged in work tasks. And that’s been happening, and that’s a positive trend.

Loney: What has this meant from a policy perspective and how entities beyond the boardroom are thinking about these components of a social policy?

Friedman: In the concluding chapter of the book, I write about the changes that I’m advancing based not only on my own views and work as a policy advocate and as an organizational consultant practitioner and as a psychologist. And at the policy level, what I was advocating for then and continue to is greater investment in child care and in family leave. Those remain issues that at the national level, we are stymied. But where we’re seeing real innovation and progress is at the state and especially at the municipal level throughout the country as more and more municipalities and states are changing their policies to provide greater support for family and medical leave, as well as for child care support of various kinds.

But as a country, we remain woefully behind our peers and in the international economy. And that is a source of shame, really, as you think about what makes for good society? Well, it’s one that cares for its most needy, and especially the next generation. We’re just not doing that nearly enough.

What Does the “Baby Bust” Mean for Future Generations?

Loney: For countries that are ahead of where our curve is right now, how have they been able to advance it? I’ve wondered whether this is another one of those areas where there’s a component of public-private partnership that may have to come together to break down that wall that has been there for many decades.

Friedman: Yeah. In fact, in 2000, when I was on leave from Wharton serving as head of leadership development for Ford Motor Company, one of the things that we were able to organize here at Wharton was a national conference on public-private partnerships in providing for child care. That’s almost 25 years ago, and we’re still not nearly as far as we need to be. But that is surely part of the solution.

The more progressive companies, the ones that are tuned into aspects of the demands of a changing labor market, yeah, they’re innovating. So, there’s a lot of innovation happening at the at the organizational level, especially in the wake of the pandemic as experiments were just flourishing everywhere in terms of new models for how you invest in people’s whole lives. But at the national level, I don’t see much hope for progress, frankly. We’ve got to look to smaller units at state and local levels, as well as in support of what private sector companies, through tax advantages and other investments, allow them to provide the kinds of support that people need.

One of the reasons people are less likely to want to have to plan to have children now — and that decline that we observed from 1992 to 2012 has only gotten worse. We haven’t done another follow up study. Maybe 2032, if I’m still around, we’ll do one. But you can look at lots of other data to see that the fertility rate in the United States is declining further. Money is a big part of that. Economics is a big part of that. But support for what families need. And that has much to do with child care, education, investing more in education as a society. Which is something that we see in some of our partners in other parts of the world. That we’re just not investing enough. Those are some of the things that are on the horizon, we hope.

Loney: There is the downstream impact of having that lower birthrate. What it’s going to mean for the population 20, 30 years down the road, and what is the economic impact?

Friedman: That’s why companies that have a long-term vision are concerned about this. But you know, most of the motivation for businesses is near-term. How do we attract the best and the brightest? Well, we’ve got to have policies and practices in culture that truly values the whole person.

Economists have been studying birthrates for a long time because you need people to replenish your economic engine. And that’s why it is such a pressing issue as you look at the strategic view of where our society is going.

Loney: One of the things that you talked about in the book is the reason behind opting out of parenthood, and the reasons may differ between men and women. Why?

Friedman: Once we saw that there was this huge gap that was the same for men and women in terms of their plans for whether or not they were going to have children, we looked into, why is this? How is it different, if it is, for men and women? Indeed, for women, the drivers had more to do with their increased interest in providing help to other people through their careers, and also in their networks of friendships. These were in some ways playing a more important role in their identities than becoming a mother. So, that was an important shift.

There was also the reduced interest in religion. The people who identified as atheist or agnostic — this is for women or for men — the more likely they were going to say “No, that’s not something that I have to do, to become a mother,” because they were less bound by traditional expectations for a woman’s role in society.

For men, on the other hand, it had more to do with money. Especially if you were a student and have loans to pay back. Now, you were less likely to think about having or planning to have children. But they also anticipated greater conflict between their work and family roles than the prior generation. Because as I said earlier, they were more likely to have views of family life that were egalitarian, in the sense that both men and women were going to be playing equal partner roles in making both their careers and their domestic organization work. So, they anticipated greater conflict.

When I started to have discussions with students and alumni about these results 10 years ago, one of the things that I heard quite a bit was young men being afraid to become fathers because they thought that they might fail in the role. That was another inhibitor that we were hearing in discussions, because of their expectation of greater conflict. At the same time, there was a student in one of my undergraduate classes, where I began the class by asking people what their aspirations were for their careers. And one of them, as we’re going around first day of class, said, “Well, my career aspiration is to be a full-time dad.” Of course, I nearly fell off my chair when I heard that. This is about 10 years ago. But you definitely would not have heard that 1992.

That’s just a little outcropping of how men are thinking differently. They’re not their father’s father in terms of they don’t think of themselves as necessarily the ideal worker who is 100% available anytime, anywhere. They want to have a greater impact in their families, but because of that higher expectation for the domestic role, less of them are choosing to invest in it.

Loney: For people that read the book, what is it you hope they take away from it?

Friedman: I think you get a sort of interior view on how people think and feel about their lives and careers that you don’t get from economic or sociological studies, because this is not just about employment. Am I going to work? Am I not going to work? Am I going to have kids? Am I not going to have kids?

This digs deep into why people are thinking this way. And what we can do to help people think about and find creative ways to live the lives they truly want to live. I think that’s another note of optimism that I took from this study, and I still am holding on to. There’s greater freedom now for women and men to choose the roles they want to play in life. How we invest in that? It’s an important part of the back part of the book, which is implications for policy but also organizational practice. What can you do as a manager, as an executive, as a CEO, to organize your accompany and to promote certain values and practices that enable people to live the lives they truly want to live? Whether that’s becoming parents or not. There’s also a material there on what you as an individual or as a family can do to become more conscious of the choices that you’ve got available to you, and how to get support for taking those choices and making them real to craft the life that that you want to live.

I hope that people will take both a better understanding of this phenomenon, why it’s important for our country, for our businesses, but also to get some practical insights about what they can do to try to promote positive change at the social level, at the organizational level, and perhaps most importantly, in their own lives and families.