United States | News & Politics

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Every two years, the Census Bureau quietly appends a battery of fertility-related questions to its workhorse monthly questionnaire, the Current Population Survey, our go-to source for everything from the unemployment rate to Americans’ moving habits.

Hammered by the Great Recession, soaring student debt, precarious gig employment, skyrocketing home prices and the covid-19 crisis, millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other generation.

And, unlike previous generations, millennials had the means to delay pregnancy thanks to affordable, long-acting birth-control options, said Alison Gemmill, a demographer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

If women are able to follow through on their delayed family plans, much of the rise in childlessness could be erased, according to a 2020 analysis of the same data set by Gemmill and Caroline Sten Hartnett of the University of South Carolina.

These days, when the outlook may be even bleaker, there’s intense pressure to pump your kids up with every available ounce of organic superfood, superior schooling and extracurricular enrichment to give them a slim shot at getting ahead.

So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support, Guzzo said: “If I don’t do everything right, then my kid will end up living on my couch forever or be a serial killer.

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