Children: Culture, and Demography

"If you don't hear crying, the Parish is dying!" I know it's trite but it's still true. The answer to the "birth dearth" is the Church's teaching on sexual morality.

From One Peter Five

By the Hon. Joseph Shaw, DPhil(Oxon), FRSA, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce

This is a reflection on two books published this year:

Catherine Pakaluk Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024)

Paul Morland No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children (Forum, 2024)

Over the last decade or two, we have become used to the fact that we are facing a demographic winter. For some time this fact had to struggle to be heard, because of the entrenched idea that the problem was the opposite, a population explosion that would overwhelm the world’s capacity to produce food. Although this theory was dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, and lingers to this day in some circles, it was always very dubious and for a long time now has been clearly false. The rate of the growth of the world population peaked in the early 1960s. The growth rate has continued to decline since then, and as night follows day it will fall below zero in the decades to come, and the world population will begin to shrink.

These two books give important insights into the relationship between economics, demography, and values. Paul Morland is a demographer without a particular religious axe to grind: he frequently reminds his readers of his support for contraception. Catherine Pakaluk, married to the Catholic philosopher Michael Pakaluk, is a Catholic mother of eight, and also a social scientist with a background in economics, who led a research project to interview 55 women in America who had college degrees and at least five children.

Paul Morland sets out the facts of the demographic implosion the world is facing: how severe it is, how difficult to reverse it will be, and the frightening consequences that can be expected from it. These consequences are already unfolding in Japan, a rich country where old people are increasingly dying alone and untended in their homes. Japan is unusual in having resisted mass immigration as a solution to falling numbers of young people joining the workforce, but as Morland points out, the world as a whole cannot solve its demographic problem through immigration. When poorer countries arrive at the demographic stage that Japan is in today, the consequences for the care of the elderly will be ugly. Already, relatively poor nations such as Thailand and Jamaica have fertility rates well below replacement levels, and many other countries are heading in the same direction. The demographic winter will reach some countries before others, but it is not a problem only for the rich world.

Morland also questions the hopeful idea that new technology will come to the rescue. He points out that rapid technological development is a feature of countries with plenty of young people: young inventors eager to think in new ways, backed by young investors with a long time-horizon and an appetite for risk. The number of Nobel prizes for science won by Japanese scientists has plummeted as its population has aged.

Morland also effectively dismisses concerns about the environment and finite resources. All the world’s problems, from poverty to pollution, are best addressed by a young and vigorous population, not an aging population concerned to ensure a comfortable retirement, and quite unconcerned about what happens more than twenty years down the road. Many arguments about the problems caused by population growth ignore the key fact, as Morland puts it: that people are a resource. With more people, more things can be done, at lower cost, with greater innovation, more division of labour, and denser and therefore more efficient networks.

The reason for the decline in fertility rates

Why have fertility rates fallen so far in the developed world, and why is the rest of the world following the same pattern? The consensus view of demographers is a simple and plausible one, which they express in terms of ‘intergenerational flows of wealth.’

This has been transformed by three linked developments took place in the West gradually, from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, and have been happening much more rapidly in the rest of the world since then.

First, the home and its immediate environs ceased to be the location of a lot of paid work: handlooms gave way to factories, the proportion of people working on the land fell, and so on. This reduced the value of children’s work in the house, particularly work for the marketplace.

The second accompanied this: the rolling out of modern, state-sponsored, and often compulsory education, that demands so much of children’s time that they have much less chance to help around the place.

The third development was the advent of modern, state-sponsored and often universal pensions, that make financial provision for old people. Not only have the contributions of children become less necessary to the planning of a tolerable old age, but over time pensions have transformed expectations about the relationships between children and their aged parents.

With these developments, many of the costs of raising children remain the responsibility of parents: even if medical care and education are provided free at the point of delivery, which is by no means always the case across the world, children still need to be clothed, housed, and fed. Children consume their parents’ resources, but neither as young workers nor as mature providers for their parents’ old age do children promise anything like the direct return on parental investment that they once did. In sum, the age-old transfer of wealth from children to parents has been reversed.

As I have just said, in the context of the modern state children no longer provide for their parents’ old age directly. They continue to do so indirectly, however, through their taxes. State pensions are not paid for out of workers’ accumulated savings, as private pensions are. They are paid out of general taxation. In order to pay for tomorrow’s pensioners, the state is not storing up contributions from today’s workers; it is relying on tax contributions from tomorrow’s workers.

This creates a monumental free-rider problem. Those who do not pay the costs associated with raising children get the same pension as those who do, but if children are not raised in sufficient numbers to join the workforce, the system will collapse. What is worse is that in general these vital contributions to the system are not even encouraged by a sense of civic duty, as usually happens in the context of a free-rider problem. People who leave a pile of unwashed dishes in a shared kitchen are at least expected to feel guilty about it. Where having children is concerned, the message of many influential voices, particularly in the Anglosphere, is that it is those who are helping to sustain the system who should feel guilty, as people who have made a self-indulgent life-style choice, while those who are not doing so can bask in a sense of moral superiority for keeping their carbon foot-print small.

Expressing it in this way makes it clearer why policy measures intended to encourage childrearing have been relatively ineffective. Under modern conditions, the financial penalty for having a large family is gigantic. Non-financial motives stimulate a few brave souls to have large families despite this, but trying to turn the financial incentives around would be a massive undertaking.

Values

As Morland points out, financial considerations are fortunately only part of the story. People are prepared to spend money on what they think is worthwhile, what is personally fulfilling, and what signals status and achievement. If having four or more children were seen as having value equivalent to flying first class or taking an annual skiing holiday in Zermatt, then couples would be willing to make a financial sacrifice to achieve it.

This is whereCatherine Pakaluk’sresearch comes in. She wanted to discover what motivated her interviewees to have so many more children than most women graduates. The answer is that they valued having children.

These mothers come from a number of different religious traditions, and some are non-religious, but they articulate the idea that children are worthy of choice very eloquently. As she summarises, ‘the relevant obstacle to having a child, they said, was the cost of missing out on the other things you could have done with your time, your money, or your life.’ Again: ‘the women we met told us that they valued childbearing – and children – more than the other things they could do with their time. More than their careers, their passions, and getting a good night’s sleep.’ By contrast, a Chinese Weibo user quoted by The Economist declared: ‘Getting married and having little chives can only harm my personal development and lower my quality of life.’[1] Apparently, ‘chives’ is Chinese internet slang for dupes.

Demographers have long pointed to South Korea, Japan, and Italy as countries where traditional family structures seem to have exacerbated the birth dearth, on the basis that in these countries social expectations make it harder for women to combine motherhood with a career. They contrast the Scandinavian countries whose subsidised child-care and other policies have resulted in a more robust birthrate, at least until recently. The Scandinavian model lowered the cost of having children, not so much in terms of money but in terms of what else you can do with your life.

The problem with this approach is that not only does it not do anything to heighten the perception of the value of having a child, it may actually depress it. What attitude to the value of the mother-child relationship, for example, will be fostered by a generation of mothers discouraged from spending time with their growing children? In any case, the fertility party is over for the Nordic nations. Having enjoyed for some decades fertility rates not far below replacement levels, in the last fifteen years or so they have fallen by as much as half a child. What needs to be shifted above all is the value women expect to realise from having children, not the convenience of having them.

We may illustrate the problem with cognitive behavioural therapy, the state’s favoured approach to rehabilitating criminals, on the rare occasions that funds can be found to attempt any kind of rehabilitation. The point of the therapy is to get the client to think rationally about how he could realistically reach his goals. Well, my friend, drug dealing and petty crime haven’t worked out very well for you, have they? Think about what you’d like to be doing in five years. No, not trying out another prison, but maybe having a decent place to live, a car, and a relationship. How could you get there? Have you considered getting a job? And so on.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is perfect for the modern British state because it is values-free, or rather, it works with the values the client has already got (though no doubt there are limits to this in practice). I don’t doubt that it can get good results in some cases. But for many harder cases it is going to fall flat, because they are not motivated by the good things of life. Their time horizon has shrunk to the weekend, and their planning has devolved to the path of least resistance. What they need is not better means-to-ends reasoning; what they need is the ends. What they need is what is supplied to many people by religion: values.

This lack of motivation is associated with depression. Perhaps that Weibo user had all sorts of plans, to learn Elvish and find a cure for cancer, and wanted to remain child-free to devote all his energy to these things. Most people who say that they don’t want children, however, do not have noble and demanding ambitions. They just want to spend more time playing video games and taking recreational drugs. It is as if we have a whole culture that is suffering from depression.

Curing Cultural Depression

Successive British governments have displayed an extreme reluctance to doing anything along these lines. Members of our political elite express this in terms of not wanting to tell people how many children they should have, because of a general principle of not wanting to tell people what to do.

On other matters, of course, the Government is very willing to tell us what to do: not just to eat less salt and do more exercise, but to change our attitudes about race or gender or sexual orientation. They have even adopted the language of cultural change as a policy goal. If young women think that a career in science is not for them, this is wrong and must be changed, by relentless propaganda backed up by all sort of resources, and enforced if necessary by quotas in university admissions and even jobs. If young women think that having three children is not for them, on the other hand, it would apparently infringe their freedom for schools even to present this as a positive option among others.

In vain does Paul Morland point out that outside the Anglosphere, pro-natalism is not exclusively the property of the political right: that President Mitterrand of France promoted childbirth, that Stalin banned abortion, that Latvia has adopted pro-family policies, and so on. The very idea of the family has become a sort of cultural kryptonite for English-speaking feminists.

Unfortunately, this brand of feminism has unique influence over world-wide cultural attitudes, and even in places where demographic realities have established a consensus among the political elite, whether in liberal Latvia or communist Cuba, they face an uphill struggle in presenting childrearing as a worthwhile use of large portions of one’s life.

I want to end with a final illustration of the difference between an incentive and a cultural value, by reference to the Catholic Church’s attitude to virginity and celibacy. Everyone knows that the Church is against abortion and contraception, and if one wanted to explain in what sense the Church is pro-natalist, it would be natural to point to those things. However, outsiders might just as well imagine that the value attached to virginity and celibacy would pull in the opposite direction. After all, the Church traditionally holds celibacy as a higher calling than the married state.

Here is the odd thing, though. Somehow, in Catholic culture the married life and the life of a religious, though alternatives for young Catholics, don’t exactly seem to be in competition. We do not see in different epochs or places one rising at the expense of the other: on the contrary, a healthy number of vocations to the priesthood and the religious life seems to go with good numbers for marriage and family formation. In 2011, during the brief moment of Pope Benedict-inspired optimism about ordination statistics, I did a research project on the statistics published over the decades in the Catholic Directory for England and Wales. On marriages, I found:

The number of marriages collapsed by a third between 1968 and 1978 … and has continued a rapid decline since then, now standing at less than 10,000 a year, a quarter of the 1968 level in absolute terms.

The story is strikingly similar for ordinations to the priesthood: they fell by more than half between 1965 and 1977, and continued to decline thereafter, and at the time of writing were only a third of their peak.

Again, just as priests and religious abandoned their vocations in the 1970s and 1980s, so marriages have been ended by divorce. I’m not suggesting that one is the cause of the other, but that both are being driven by a common factor.

Catholics are invited to make the sacrifice of their independence and the opportunities it represents for the much deeper satisfactions of the consecrated life, or of family life: satisfactions that are possible only in the context of life-long commitment and sacrifice. When this spirit of commitment and sacrifice, accompanied by a trust in Providence, declines, it undermines everything for which a long-term commitment is necessary.

Long-term commitment is exactly the kind of thing that the depressive is incapable of making; it is that thing that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy cannot teach. It is the response to value at the bottom of the religious impulse: a recognition of something outside of ourselves that inspires us to act, to realise or to preserve something of great value.

In the words of one of Catherine Pakaluk’s interviewees: ‘Nothing I ever do will be more purposeful, meaningful, and have more impact on a human than giving them a body and then nurturing them as a human. For me, it’s the most worthwhile thing that I will do in this life.’[2]

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[1] The Economist 17th January 2023.

[2] Pakaluk, 50.