Having kids makes women happier. We need to do more to support motherhood. | Opinion
We can either continue giving women the chance to pursue their own happiness or find a lasting solution to the problem of chronically low birth rates by incentivizing women to have kids.
We all know that nations across the globe, the United States included, are experiencing a fertility crisis. Women are not having enough children to keep populations constant, and this is sure to put a massive strain on our economies and governments in years to come.
It’s also common knowledge that a large part of the reason women have fewer children these days is that we have greater educational and professional opportunities than we had in the past. As women have been empowered, we’ve chosen to pursue our careers at the expense of producing more offspring and have generally found great satisfaction in doing so.
It seems that we are nearing a crossroads. We can either continue giving women the chance to pursue their own happiness or find a lasting solution to the problem of chronically low birth rates by encouraging and incentivizing women to have kids.
But is this really the case? Is it true that we must choose between allowing women to live more fulfilling lives and ensuring that our populations don’t collapse?
Not if you ask me. Contrary to conventional wisdom, in my view, women would actually feel more empowered and fulfilled, not less, if our lifestyles were more conducive to having children.
I'm a young woman who wants to start a family
Before getting into all the reasons why women should shift our focus from our professional to our private lives, I should preface by stating that I am a 24-year-old, childless woman. I’ve benefited greatly from having the educational and career opportunities that I do, and I don’t plan on giving them up anytime soon.
However, I do want children, as do 41% of American women under 35. Although the average American woman is now expected to have only 1.6 births in her lifetime ‒ a number that is far below the 2.1 births per woman needed to replace our existing population ‒ the number of children that women in the United States say they hope to have has remained relatively stable at slightly more than two over the past few decades.
If women could achieve our stated goals of having more kids, there’s a good chance we’d feel more satisfied with our lives than if we settled for a family situation we deemed less than ideal.
So why don’t we? Because ensuring that we have multiple children, hopefully within the confines of marriage, nowadays is hard work and necessitates much planning. It also requires that women make tough choices and trade-offs, unlike it did in the past when our culture was more traditional and women had fewer options for what we could do with our lives.
Beyond just the difficulties that women ‒ and men, to be sure ‒ face in finding a suitable partner to settle down with, women struggle to plan how and when we will achieve both the career and personal-life milestones we set for ourselves before our fertile years are up. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that many of us find ourselves making sacrifices on either the professional or personal front and end up unable to have as many kids as we initially wanted.
Women clearly want to have children, but there are obstacles
My female friends and I frequently discuss how, although women have been liberated to join the workforce, we haven't been freed from having to live on men's timelines, so to speak. That is, in order to compete with our male counterparts, we're expected to spend our 20s earning advanced degrees and establishing our careers and only begin settling down in our 30s, despite the former accounting for most of our peak reproductive years.
Given these circumstances, our goal of having two or more children has become something we want to achieve and believe would make us happy but is fairly difficult to accomplish.
These challenges that women face have made it such that having two or more children has become an aspiration in much the same way that achieving our dream physique is, for example. That is, it’s something we really do want for ourselves and believe would make us happy, but our busy, modern lifestyles make it fairly difficult for us to accomplish.
And we are correct to think that having children would lead us to feel more satisfied with our lives, by the way. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans were more likely to say that family and children give their lives meaning over any other factor, including career, material well-being and friends.
Some research also supports the idea that parents possess greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning in life than childless adults do.
There are certainly some women who are dead set on not having children because they’d like to devote themselves to their careers or want to have greater financial freedom. But many women know that children are a source of happiness, not a barrier to it, and would feel most fulfilled if we were able to spend greater time and energy on our children and families while also maintaining our careers.
We should certainly do more to lower the barriers to having kids that women face. Finding ways to make housing and child care more affordable is an imperative. And technological advancements such as those that make in vitro fertilization possible can alleviate the time crunch that women face as their chances of conceiving naturally diminish over time.
We need to do more to help women find happiness
Vice President JD Vance recently gained attention for declaring at a pro-life rally that he “wants more babies in the United States of America.”
He's also praised President Donald Trump for installing anti-abortion federal judges and Supreme Court justices and for increasing the child tax credit during his first term, having seemingly made raising the birth rate a policy priority of his vice presidential term.
Regardless of the effectiveness of those measures at substantially increasing the birth rate, I believe Vance was correct to claim that radically individualistic ideals have misled many into viewing the “responsibilities and joys of family life were seen as obstacles to overcome, not as personal fulfillment or personal blessings” and overlooking the obligations that one generation has to another.
Finding a solution to the fertility crisis requires acknowledging that a state of affairs in which women are having more children is also one in which we’re living happier, more meaningful lives. It requires lessening the trade-offs women must make between professional advancement and a healthy family life.
And, finally, it requires finding ways that women may balance what we owe to past and future generations with what we owe to ourselves.
Surya Gowda is a fact-checking fellow with Paste BN Opinion.