Most of us in our 20s and 30s are familiar with the rhythms of friend-group life changes. First, people find their long-term relationships, and in each case you hear all the dish about who this new person is, and you vet them to make sure they’re a fit match for your beloved friend. Then, the couple moves in together, so you help assemble new furniture and attend the housewarming party. After that, maybe there’s a wedding—or, in the past couple of years, a Zoom ceremony—and you clink Champagne and make teary-eyed toasts.
Everyone knows what comes next: Wait a couple of years, and your calendar will start filling up with invitations to baby showers and sip and sees, and you find yourself shopping for teensy shoes and picture books and other gifts appropriate for new parents.
But here’s the thing about 2022. I have ushered friends through new beaus and breakups and reignited crushes, met all the new significant others, attended all the housewarming parties. I have a closet full of bridesmaid dresses from all the beautiful weddings I celebrated with gusto.
But as I look at my friends—married to all kinds of people, scattered across the country and doing different jobs—few of them are having babies. More tell me they’re waiting until their finances—and, accordingly, their lives—feel more stable.
This isn’t just happening to my friend group. In 2020, the U.S. birthrate hit an all-time low, and the slight uptick in 2021 still bears out a longer-term trend of declining births.
Inequity and uncertainty
Much of the conversation around the drop in birthrate has been to pearl-clutch at “entitled” millennial stereotypes or to pontificate on the joys of child-rearing. But for many of my female friends contemplating future parenthood, the pandemic highlighted longstanding inequalities and challenges faced by women with children: wage stagnation, the high cost of child care, inadequate paid leave for parents—not to mention the ever-increasing stress of an already stressed population.
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“I’ve seen how women got screwed in this,” one female friend said to me, referring to the disproportionate effect of the crisis on women.
As another friend told me, having a child right now doesn’t feel “financially safe.” She pointed to headlines about the seemingly unending parade of new coronavirus variants and instability in her particular industry as reasons for delaying pregnancy.
“There’s just so much uncertainty right now,” she said. “That is not going to change in 2022.”
Historically, fertility drops during wars, recessions and pandemics, says Christine Percheski, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. In these periods of tragedy and uncertainty, someone doesn’t have to be directly affected by the crisis at hand to want to delay childbearing.
“It’s not just about if an individual lost their job,” Prof. Percheski says. “It’s a generalized uncertainty or economic turmoil in their communities.”
Familiar and lasting issues
When I talk to my friends about this, many say they plan to keep delaying parenthood for a year, then another, then another, at least waiting until they finally manage to pay down student loans, buy a home or otherwise attain some marker of financial stability. They want to be able to meet the rising price of child care and more easily absorb these extra costs into their budgets.
Sarah Behr, a financial planner and founder of Simply Financial in San Francisco, says she often talks with clients who want to optimize the financial path to parenthood.
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“I have some people who are like, ‘I’m not making a dent in my student loans. How can I imagine adding kids to the mix right now? How would that work? I can’t afford it with everything else,’ ” she says. “I also have clients where one half of the couple is hyperanalytical. They think, ‘The clock is ticking and I can’t wait forever,’ and there’s someone who has spreadsheets and wants certainty, and I am like, ‘You’re kidding yourself.’ ”
Even before the pandemic taught us to expect the unexpected, members of the millennial generation often considered postponing having children until they achieved financial milestones.
“A lot of people want to wait until they pay down that debt and have a more secure job before they have children,” Prof. Percheski says. “In some ways, that calculus, it’s not a story of something radically new there, it’s a story of continuing economic uncertainty. It’s been like that for a while now.”
And unfortunately for my friends hoping to perfectly plot every step of parenthood, that uncertainty isn’t going away. Abigail Sussman, associate professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that for people looking to make huge transitions, the expectation of normalcy in the wider world can be reassuring—and without that assurance, it’s easy to revert to inaction.
“Omicron in particular is a major blow to everyone’s ability to plan,” she says. “It feels like one thing after another, and I think this is all very discouraging for people.”
“We do all this planning and thinking about this event, but we can’t predict a lot about ourselves and how our feelings change, or what the costs are,” says Yana Gallen, an assistant professor of policy at the University of Chicago. “People don’t have a way of forming expectations about this really rare thing that will likely only happen to them a couple of times in their life.”
But conversely, Ms. Behr says, getting comfortable with uncertainty can be great preparation for planning your journey into parenthood, and I passed along this small nugget of wisdom to my friends weighing their decisions.
“There’s no certainty with children,” Ms. Behr says. “There is no day that’s exactly like the next.”
Ms. Carpenter is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York. Email her at julia.carpenter@wsj.com.
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