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.
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."
"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."
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?"
Childlessness in Finland majorly appearing for the first time:
Until recently, fertility decline was driven by families having fewer children than their parents and grandparents. Now the key dynamic is childlessness. In Finland, three-quarters of the recent decline in fertility is attributable to people who have no children. "You see similar trends everywhere." In the family barometer surveys, among Finns born in the late 1970s and 1980s, fewer than one in twenty said at the age of 25 that they didn't want to have children. Among those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that proportion rose to nearly one in four. Nearly 40 per cent of Finnish men with low education are now childless at the age of 45 (and probably for life): a "huge" proportion. Most have no partners. Men are as likely as women to say they want children, but are more likely to be childless.
The idealized life course for more and more modern women unfortunately doesn't line up with biology:
Women's fertility drops in their late thirties and forties: society has to adapt. "If you do everything that typical ministers of finance tell you to do, you are 45 — you have a house and a doctorate and it's too late. The idealised life course is really at odds with female reproductive biology."
I know the internet is typically not a place for nuanced discussion but it feels short sighted to approach the fertility topic by just screaming about money. Globally, Human lives are far more complex and busy than at any time in history. People also live in far more luxurious and resourced standards of living than ever before. Hunger and poverty are at all time lows.
Far less people are having kids "because there's nothing else to do" since there's a whole lot to do now.
People in developed countries (especially Europe) can find things to do for an entire lifetime beyond having children (traveling the world, picking up hobbies, and women can work!) without getting bored.