Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are family-friendly policies no longer enough? Henry Mance - Financial Times writer - 2024 Jan 29

Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high. Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare.

But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere.

This is a puzzle for Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute. A sociologist and demographer, she is one of Europe’s experts on how young people view having children. In 2020 and 2021, she advised then Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin on reinvigorating the country’s birth rate.

Across the world, fertility is declining in very different societies — conservative and liberal, big and small state, growing economies and stagnating ones. Even India — known for its growing population — now has fewer births per woman than the theoretical replacement rate of 2.1. In Europe in 2023, the rate fell in “Hungary, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, all the ones who were really high or were paraded as examples . . . It seems that Finland might be a forerunner, unfortunately.”

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said the birth rate is a “top priority”. French President Emmanuel Macron this month promised “demographic rearmament”. But Rotkirch cautions that their efforts are likely to underwhelm. “When you work with politicians, you always see the same things. ‘Oh yes, we should have one month’s more paternity leave!’ All the scholars are like: you should, but it won’t change anything.”

Europe’s policy challenge, she wrote recently, is “to prevent a [fertility] freefall as witnessed in many East Asian countries”. Yet policies that worked last century may not work today. Some are likely to cost huge sums without delivering the desired results.

“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”

At the Family Federation, Rotkirch oversees a unique series of surveys, which ask young people not just how many children they are planning to have, but how many they would ideally like to have.

Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’ life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”

This helps to explain why it is no longer Europeans with less education who want more children. Instead “those who are well-off in many ways — [who] have a partner, have support from their parents, are employed, are not lonely — want to have more children . . . This is quite a new thing in many countries, including England.”

The phenomenon inverts the theory of “uncertainty reduction”, which held that people, particularly from poorer backgrounds, had children to shore up their lives. “[The idea was:] my career isn’t going well, my relationships are a bit here and there, but at least I have a child . . . You just don’t see that way of thinking any more. For millennials, uncertainty reduction is not to have children.”

Rotkirch also suspects that the spread of social media is playing a role, not least by stoking political polarisation, loneliness and mental health issues, which reduce fertility.

Stabilising birth rates may require not just top-down policies but a societal rethink. “What would society look like if we valued reproduction, and raising babies, not just your own, as much as [economic] production?”

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