Is starting a family becoming impossible?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

In this episode of The Gray Area, guest host Christine Emba speaks with journalist Anna Louise Sussman about her book 'Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.'

Key takeaways

• Fertility decline is not just about economics but reflects a broader cultural shift driven by existential anxiety and lack of faith in the future.
• Millennials and Gen Z face unprecedented challenges compared to previous generations, including stagnant social mobility and extreme inequality.

Main topics

• Declining fertility rates among millennials and Gen Z
• Economic instability and its impact on family planning

Notable quotes

"No one can predict the future. But I think by several important metrics, this is a uniquely uncertain age."

"The willingness and ability to try for children says something about our broader state of mind as a society."

Conclusion

The decision not to start a family is increasingly shaped by structural and psychological

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I'm talking with Vice President Kamala Harris. We talk about her thoughts on public service, how D.C. has shaped her, and we find out if she's planning to run for president in 2028. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 3 (0:23) I'm Ina Garten. On my new podcast, Happy Hour with Ina, I'm inviting really interesting guests to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with chefs, actors, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. Subscribe to Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be available every Wednesday starting September 16th. Speaker 7 (1:01) Fertility is dropping around the world. Sure, there's an economic case to be made for trying to bump up birth rates. But I also think there's a deeper psychological case for doing so. The willingness and ability to try for children says something about our broader state of mind as a society. And if we're bulking at doing so, that suggests something is deeply wrong. Speaker 7 (1:29) In today's conversation, I'd like to get into the cultural reasoning for this. The stuff that isn't easily reflected by polling and statistics. The feeling of dread and uncertainty about the future that has become pervasive among millennials and Gen Z. How do these opposite of rose-colored glasses change the biggest decisions of our lives? I'm Christine Emba, sitting in for Sean Illing. And this is The Gray Area. Speaker 7 (2:06) My guest today is Anna Louis-Sussman, an author and reporter who has written several viral pieces in the New York Times, New Yorker, and elsewhere, tackling the fertility question. Her new book, Inconceivable, The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, goes deep, reporting with insight and fantastic stories on the web of factors influencing the new turn away from childbearing. She's also someone I've known for years, so it was a real pleasure to get to sit down with her in the guest chair. Speaker 2 (2:56) Anna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Christine. Past episodes of The Gray Area, we've talked about the general decline in fertility, both in the United States and around the world. But what's the generational split on this? I'll hop right in with that because you address that pretty directly in your new book. Speaker 1 (3:16) Yes. Well, thank you so much for that's a great question to start with. You know, I came to this topic because I myself in my mid thirties was trying to figure out whether I could become a parent. And as I looked around me, I thought it just seems so hard. Like I don't feel like our parents faced these same challenges. I don't think they worried about if they were ever going to buy a home in their whole life or, you know, had a crazy rat race that they had to think about putting their children through when it came time to go to school. And so I want to tell you, am I the only one who feels this way? And I started looking around and talking to other people my age, people younger, people older, you know, slightly older than I am. I'm 44 now, but I started this work at least a decade ago. And it just felt like we were facing challenges, millennials and Gen Z, that our parents really hadn't grappled with. Speaker 2 (4:10) So you're a millennial, and I feel like I'm hearing a lot of discourse around the challenges with parenting in the millennial generation specifically, as they're kind of right in the midst of when they might be doing that. But is this sense of unease or, I don't know, loss of confidence in fertility different for Gen Z, like higher even? You know, we do know that some of the reasons behind the falling fertility rate might actually be... positive ones. I mean, you know, a falling rate of unplanned teen pregnancies seems to be causing a lot of the decline in like young families starting especially. And maybe even just the idea of general empowerment, especially for women. I mean, the idea that women have more options than they've ever had before. And so the opportunity cost of becoming a parent seems perhaps higher because they can choose to do other things. There's less pressure on those who didn't want to be parents to have to become parents. I mean, are there other positive reasons that we should note before we get into the kind of darker side? Speaker 1 (5:17) I mean, absolutely. The most positive reason is that people who don't want to become parents no longer have to. And that's especially the case for women because historically that was so much a part of a woman's identity and a part of what was expected of her was for her to become a mother. And the fact that women can say, no, thank you. I'm not interested in that. I don't want to. And, you know, at least for now in the U S have access to reliable contraception and make those choices and have that agency around her own reproductive life. Like that is. wonderful. And to the extent that there are attacks on that and that people are trying to limit access to reliable contraception and have already put a lot of barriers in the way of people who need abortion care, that is something we should all be very concerned about. This book is really about people who want to be parents, have that desire, and feel like it's out of reach for them. Speaker 2 (6:16) Let's get into the reasons why younger generations are passing up on parenthood that aren't really by choice, I guess I would say. So the subtitle of your book, which is titled Inconceivable, is The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty. What exactly, I mean, just like in a few words, tell me what you mean by age of uncertainty in your view. Speaker 1 (6:41) I think this is an era where by so many metrics, we just, you know, let's start from a sort of ontological truth. No one can predict the future. But I think by several important metrics, this is a uniquely uncertain age. We know that social mobility, especially in the U.S., has declined dramatically. It's gone from a 90 % chance that you'll be better off than your parents to a... about 50%, which is, you know, as good as a coin toss. So people who are thinking of having children, there's no longer that. Speaker 1 (7:14) future that you can count on, that they'll have a better life than you. And I think that's very scary for people. You know, I think we've also seen really almost breathtaking inequality, which is scary for people. And I also feel like job quality, which is a really big part of people's lives and how they put food on the table, has dramatically declined too. I Speaker 2 (7:36) feel like one of the biggest underlying causes of this uncertainty, you point out in a number of ways, is just money. I mean, personally, I find the sort of, oh, it's affordability to be a little bit overused as a buzzword when it comes to talking about these issues. But a lot of the uncertainty does seem to revolve around finance broadly, or at least the way that they influence our choices. Would you say that it is just sort of not enough money woes generally, or is it the way that we organize our lives around money from kind of beginning to end? Speaker 1 (8:13) So I think it's going to be different for every single person. You know, I always say there are as many reasons that people do or don't have children as there are people. So it's very individual. And especially with something like money, I mean, people have really different psychological relationships to money. But I think there are certain clear things that are economic barriers for a lot of people if you just look at the numbers. One is the cost of housing, especially in places that have a lot of jobs. So where people want to migrate and have better opportunity of finding work. Some of the big cities have really, really high cost of living. And childcare is another one. If you are specifically thinking about having a child, you need to, and you want to stay in the workforce. you have to figure out how to pay for childcare. And I know for me, that was a huge stumbling block because I would have needed anywhere between $2,500 to $3,600 a Speaker 8 (9:12) month. That's after-tax money just to give to a daycare place for full-time childcare if I wanted to keep working. And that, you know, that adds up to like... tens and tens and tens of Speaker 1 (9:24) thousands of dollars over the three and a half, four years that you need before a child can enter the public school system. So that's one thing. But as you were alluding to, I don't think it's purely material, you know, circumstances. I think money structures our lives in a way that goes far beyond just what's coming in and out of your bank account. It changes how you think about your time. It changes how you prioritize things like work versus relationships. It changes the expectations for what you think a child needs in order to succeed in this world. So there's a lot of different ways it informs our psyche that I think we haven't really grappled with or don't always want to because sometimes it's kind of painful to admit. You Speaker 2 (10:12) talk about the difficulty in deciding between focusing on Project Me versus Project Someone Else? Like the amount of time we spend building our own capital, how does that make parenthood less likely? Like why would that make someone, I don't know, not have a kid? Speaker 8 (10:31) I think for a lot of people, it's not just Speaker 1 (10:34) also the ambition and the individualistic aspect of Project Me. I think there's also... There's many versions of it. And for some people, it's, I wanted to make sure my mental health was stable and under control. Or I wanted to make sure I had my student loans paid off. Or I wanted to own a home because I had housing instability as a child. And this is really important to me for my own personal traumas and personal experience to provide for a child. There is a Project Me that's about accomplishments and about sort of building your human capital and a CV that will set you up for a little bit more comfort as you're focusing on Project Someone Else. But there's also a version that's about just getting a very, very modest baseline established. Speaker 2 (11:25) And I mean, just to be clear, Project Someone Else, the someone else is the potential future child that you may or may not have. I mean, I think we... broadly have a new understanding or we've begun to talk about, you know, the concept of the greedy job or workism, the idea that we define ourselves and our worth sometimes more by our careers than we do by other aspects of our lives, namely our families. But still, in most cases, people are doing these jobs to make the money they need or think they need to survive. themselves, let alone have a child. And as you were saying, the bill for that seems higher all the time, especially with our limited safety net, all the things that you have to provide on your own. So you mentioned, you know, just daycare, housing. What else are you thinking of? I mean, there's inflation on food prices and everything else. What are some of the other costs that come to mind that people factor in? Speaker 1 (12:28) There are a lot of Instagram memes from parents where they talk about like, nobody told me what the berry bill was going to be for my kid. They eat so many berries and they're so expensive. But there are so many unexpected costs that come with being a parent. There are medical costs. I mean, there's the cost of education. There's the cost of... And again, it really depends what milieu you're moving in. I know... When I eventually became a parent, I was in a WhatsApp group with some other moms. And I don't know, a month into my leave, someone said, does anyone know what classes I can put my one month old in? And I thought, oh my gosh, am I already behind my daughters? You know, so I thought that, you know, and all these things cost money. But I think there's, this is a really important debate about what do. kids actually need. And I think this is an interesting, where I've read conservative writers and people writing about bigger families, there are things that I Speaker 8 (13:32) think that progressives could learn. You know, some Speaker 1 (13:35) of the things I've read about, you know, just your kids don't need new clothes. That was one of the things I was actually surprised about. I mean, you can buy really nice clothes for a child if you want to. There's no upper limit on what you can spend on kids' clothes. On the other hand, there's this whole Speaker 8 (13:51) kids' clothing economy that all just moves around in fresh, direct bags of, you know, parents handing off hand-me-downs to, you know, to new parents. I'm about to give some really nice stuff to your niece. So... Yeah, Speaker 2 (14:05) the visual that comes to mind for some reason after this conversation is just like someone trading the berries for like a fresh, direct bag of clothes. But, you know, I do sometimes wonder if we're suffering. or at least some of us, in thinking about like, oh, we need all these resources just to have a child. If we're suffering from some sort of mental inflation, I mean, there are many things that we need and, of course, many things that we want. But, right, do we technically need, you know, a whole new bedroom and nursery for an infant? Like, does a one-year-old or a one-month-old, like, what is the class that they're going to? Like, class for drinking milk and sleeping? You know, like... Class for Speaker 8 (14:46) rolling on your tummy. Yeah. Speaker 2 (14:48) Are our standards too high? Are we sort of pricing ourselves out of this question? Speaker 1 (14:55) I think it depends. I think there are some immovable costs. Like I said, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking the main things that were standing in my way were the cost of a slightly larger home that wasn't a fifth