Why Are Birth Rates Declining?

Insights from Economist Lyman Stone

Demographer Lyman Stone argues the fertility crisis is not simply about money, culture, or politics. It is about whether people can form the families they already say they want.

When people talk about declining birth rates, the conversation usually gets pulled in one of three directions.

Some see it as a culture war issue. Others reduce it to affordability. Others argue that it is simply a matter of private choice and that governments, communities, and institutions should stay out of it entirely.

Lyman Stone, a demographer who studies fertility, thinks all of those explanations miss something important.

“My name is Lyman Stone. I’m a demographer,” he explains. “That means I study population, specifically fertility.”

His work focuses on why people have babies, why they do not, why fertility is falling around the world, and what can be done about it. But Stone is careful not to use the issue as a vehicle for some other political argument. He says many people treat fertility as “an extra stick” to support views they already hold about immigration, gender, economics, or politics.

His own approach is more direct.

“I’m really just in it for the babies,” he says.

That line helps clarify the issue. The question is not how declining birth rates can be used to win another political debate. The question is whether people are actually able to have the families they already say they want.

The First Baby Is the Problem

So why are birth rates declining?

Stone’s simplest answer is that fewer people are forming the kinds of stable relationships where children are likely to happen.

In his conversation with Aaron Pete, Stone turned the question back on him. Aaron said he wanted three children, had no children yet, and had only recently gotten married. Stone asked whether Aaron’s odds of having a child in the next five years were higher than they had been five years earlier.

The answer was obvious: yes.

Stone’s conclusion was direct: “You’ve actually just told the story on why fertility is declining.”

The point was not that marriage is the only reason people have children, or that every family must look identical. It was that stable partnership matters. People are more likely to have children when they have someone to have children with, when they are committed to one another, and when that commitment is supported by some level of personal and economic stability.

“Fundamentally what’s going on around the world is that marriage rates are declining rapidly,” Stone says.

That matters because much of the public conversation assumes the fertility crisis is mainly about parents deciding whether to have one more child. But Stone argues the more important trend is that many people are not starting families at all.

“They’re not having the first baby,” he says.

If that is true, then the fertility crisis is not only about larger families becoming smaller. It is about more people never beginning family life in the first place.

Children Did Not Just Become Expensive. Expectations Changed.

Stone also pushes back against the idea that declining birth rates are only about individual preference.

Of course people make personal decisions. But they make those decisions inside a culture, a housing market, a labour market, and a set of social expectations that shape what feels possible.

“We make our decisions in a social context,” he says.

If people cannot afford a home with enough bedrooms, their family decisions change. If they cannot find work compatible with raising children, their family decisions change. If the surrounding culture treats having children in your twenties as strange, irresponsible, or embarrassing, that also changes people’s choices.

The choice is personal. But the conditions around that choice are not.

Stone describes the cost of children as both monetary and non-monetary. Housing and childcare matter. So do income, job stability, and family support. But the perceived cost of raising children is also shaped by what people believe a “good parent” must provide.

His example is simple: fruit.

When Stone was growing up, children might get an apple, a banana, or a cheap fruit cup. Today, many parents feel pressure to provide fresh berries, organic snacks, enrichment programs, private lessons, and a long list of things previous generations did not necessarily see as mandatory.

The apples did not disappear. But the social standard changed.

“Norms are shared,” Stone says, “and because norms are shared across a culture, norms are effectively imposed.”

That is why a high-income professional can still feel unable to afford children while a lower-income community may have more of them. The issue is not only income. It is the total perceived cost of having a child: money, time, housing, childcare, status, family support, and cultural pressure.

In other words, children did not simply become expensive. Society changed what it expects parents to buy, provide, sacrifice, and prove.

Fertility Is About Freedom, Not Coercion

One of Stone’s most important arguments is that fertility should be understood as a human rights issue.

Not because people should be pressured into having children, but because people should be able to have the children they say they want.

“Fertility is a human rights issue,” he says.

Stone connects this to reproductive autonomy. In the twentieth century, many population policies focused on preventing coercive population control and giving people the ability not to have children. Stone agrees that this remains essential. But he argues the same principle must apply in the other direction.

A society that respects reproductive autonomy should also help people have children when they want them.

“We’re not going to force people to have kids,” he says, “but we’re going to give them the tools to do it if they want.”

That framing matters. It moves the conversation away from panic about birth rates and toward a more humane question: are people being blocked from the family life they desire?

If people want children but cannot afford housing, cannot find childcare, cannot form stable relationships, or feel punished for starting a family, then society is failing them in a serious way.

What Canada Could Actually Do

For Stone, the policy conversation should start with the real barriers families face.

Housing is one of them. Canada needs more family-friendly homes, especially homes with three or more bedrooms. Apartments can work, but they need to be built for families, not just singles or couples without children.

Childcare is another. Stone argues families should have more flexibility rather than being pushed toward one model of care. Some families want childcare centres. Others want grandparents, neighbours, friends, babysitters, or parents themselves to provide care. His preferred model is a flexible childcare voucher that families can use for different forms of care, with support for families who choose home-based care.

Stone is also more open to direct financial support than many policy experts.

“We shouldn’t underrate cash,” he says.

He argues that baby bonuses can help, especially if designed creatively. One idea he supports is creating investment accounts for children that grow over time and become available when they become parents themselves. Instead of only giving families a small amount when costs are highest, governments could seed accounts early and let market returns do much of the work.

The point is not that money solves everything. It is that money can remove real pressure at the exact stage of life when people are deciding whether they can afford to begin a family.

Stone’s broader argument is that fertility decline is not unsolvable. It is not merely the result of feminism, contraception, education, wealth, housing, or any single social change. Those may all be part of the story. But causes and solutions do not have to be identical.

“We don’t have to fix causes to fix problems,” he says.

That may be the most important insight in the entire conversation.

A society can spend decades arguing about why birth rates fell. It can divide the issue into politics, culture, gender, economics, religion, and individual choice. But if people are having fewer children than they say they want, then something is going wrong.

For Stone, the goal is not coercion. It is not nostalgia. It is not forcing one model of family life on everyone.

It is building a society where people who want children are not blocked by housing, money, instability, lack of support, or a culture that quietly teaches them family is an obstacle to the good life.

The real question is not whether every person should have children.

The question is whether Canada is making it too hard for people to have the families they already want.