Where Do(es the Desire for) Babies Come From?

Can big families offer us a clue?

A note for newcomers: Welcome to Family Stuff! My name is Stephanie Murray. I’m a freelance journalist and contributing writer for The Atlantic. Here on Substack, I publish a weekly round-up of newly published research on demography, family policy, and other family stuff. I also publish essays, like this one. If you like my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can keep it up! I’m currently running a 50% off sale on annual subscriptions, so if you are considering upgrading, now is the time!

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Last year, I was invited to speak on a panel hosted by Civitas, a UK-based think tank that aims to facilitate “informed public debate” on all manner of public policy. The topic of discussion was “what is childcare for?” But, as often happens during family-policy-talk these days, the conversation quickly turned to the birth rate, which is falling in the United Kingdom as it is elsewhere. At one point, one of the other panelists observed that there is a big gap between the number of kids that people want and the number they are having. If people didn’t want kids, she said, then we “should all just pack up and go home.” But people do want kids, so, she reasoned, we should help them out.

I share this anecdote because I think it aptly locates where my perspective on so-called “fertility ideals” diverges from that of many others who take an interest in family policy. For my fellow panelist, the case for any sort of “pronatalist” policy hinged entirely on people already wanting kids. She seemed to think that, absent such desire, it’s sort of silly, if not icky, to devote any resources to boosting the birth rate. Simply put, I do not share this view. As I said during the panel discussion, if the average ideal family size dropped to zero, I would not “pack up and go home.” Quite the opposite: I would think, “wow, what is it about our society that has made having children such an unattractive prospect? We’ve really got our work cut out for us.”

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Whether or not you are disturbed by my view on this will likely depend on your understanding of the nature of the desire for children. A lot of people speak about “fertility ideals” as fixed and internal, as if there exists deep within each of us a little glowing orb that, if you could just silence all forms of social pressure and set aside material considerations, you can hear whispering the exact number of children you ought to have. From that perspective, any attempt at influencing the number of children that people want looks a bit gross. Indeed, plenty of people seem to think it impossible. To name one example, the philosopher Kate Manne recently wrote a piece making the case against having children in which she observed at the top that “if you really want to have a child, deep in your heart, then that desire will rightly silence everything I have to say here.”

I do not believe in fertility ideals as such. I am skeptical of the idea that it is possible to separate one’s desire for children from the society and circumstances one inhabits. Sure, there are some people who probably wouldn’t feel drawn to parenthood in any society or age or circumstance. Some, on the other end of the spectrum, would find a way to have kids even if they were living on Mars. But I think for a lot of people, “ideal family size” is inevitably shaped by, and highly sensitive to, a whole variety of social and economic forces.

There are a lot of reasons that I hold this view, most of which I won’t get into here. But one of them is that we already know that people’s childbearing patterns are influenced by various aspects of their childhood. There is, for example, a correlation between the number of siblings that someone has and the number of children they both want and actually have. The association between one’s family size in childhood and adulthood—which is sometimes called the “intergenerational transmission of fertility”—is the subject of a piece that I wrote for Deseret Magazine’s June issue. The correlation has shifted over time but currently in the U.S., each additional sibling translates to an additional fifth of a son or daughter. That isn’t huge, but it certainly isn’t nothing. Those of you hoping for grandkids should take note: Arguably one of the best ways to ensure that your kids have kids is to give them a couple of siblings.

I became interested in the intergenerational transmission of fertility partly because I can see it operating in my own life and family. I am one of five children, most of whom have indeed bucked the “later and fewer” trend among our highly educated millennial peers. A few days ago, people on Twitter were lamenting the fact that, as birth rates have fallen, their kids are now growing up with very few cousins, if any at all. With 13 cousins and another on the way, my kids are on track to have as many cousins as I do, if not more.

As I write in the Deseret piece, I find people’s tendency to replicate their parents’ childbearing patterns “intuitive, but also somewhat puzzling.” Like, of course people who grow up in big families are more likely to have big families: it’s what they know. At the same time, it seems just as reasonable to think that it would go the other way—that people with many siblings, frustrated by a childhood of inadequate parental attention and the indignity of never getting a new, properly-fitting pair of shoes, might opt to raise one child and lavish all they have on them.

Speaking to researchers who’ve studied the intergenerational transmission of fertility unearthed a lot of theories, but few solid answers. Unsurprisingly, a good chunk of the siblings-kids correlation can be explained by things like religion or socioeconomic status, but there’s plenty that remains unaccounted for. And while most of the researchers that I spoke to were open to the idea that something about growing up in a big family actually causes someone to want and have more kids, they hesitated to hang their hat on any particular mechanism.

One researcher that I spoke to—Martin Kolk, an associate professor of demography at Stockholm University—thinks that, at least in Sweden, the many-siblings-to-many-kids link may have something to do with the family-oriented values that parents in large families tend to hold and pass on to their kids. In one of his studies, Kolk found that when you hold family background constant, the impact of an additional sibling on fertility disappears. In other words, an extra sibling, independent of the parent’s values and socioeconomic status, doesn’t lead someone to have more kids. But in another, he found that socioeconomic factors such as education and income don’t really explain much of the transmission of fertility in Sweden. Taken together, these findings point to the intergenerational transmission of family values as a likely culprit.

But there are a lot of possible forces at play here. It could be that big families almost inevitably take a more relaxed approach to raising children, which could make the whole childrearing enterprise seem less daunting. Or it could have something to do with peer effects—every additional sibling increases your likelihood of knowing someone who has opted to have children, which could prompt you to do the same.

Some of the most interesting research that I cover in the piece points to the role that caring for one’s siblings might play in spurring one’s desire to become a parent. One rather problematic study based in Poland found that “childhood parentification” is associated with a stronger desire to have children. The connection doesn’t appear to be driven by some sort of maladaptive caregiver syndrome: the link between parentification and the desire for kids was “fully mediated by positive childbearing motivation,” the study reads. “It appears that the participants who were more involved in family caregiving in their childhood and adolescent years had a more positive image of family and parenthood, which translated into a stronger desire to have their own child.” As such, the authors conclude that “early caring activities, especially when they evoke feelings of satisfaction and appreciation in the child, may play an important role in shaping childbearing motivations and desires.” Another study by the same author yielded a similar finding.

Whatever the true reason that big families tend to beget big (or at least, bigger) families, I invite readers to consider the possibility that society has “something to learn from big families.” It seems to me that, as long as we’re casting about for ways to reverse low fertility, shooting to make American life more like life in a big family isn’t a bad place to start. I don’t see why caregiving experience, for example, has to be a benefit exclusive to those with a bunch of siblings. I know I probably need to take the whole citing

Elena Bridgers

thing down a notch, but one thing she has previously pointed out is that, for most of human history, early caregiving experience was pretty much universal: “Everyone in [traditional societies] has loads of hands-on experience with kids, even the ones without kids, even the other kids.”

I can personally attest to the fact that kids don’t need siblings to get hands on experience looking after children. I’ve written before about the “baby swap” that my husband and I started during the pandemic and that has since grown into “something like the proverbial ‘village’ that so many modern parents go without,” as I once put it. This certainly wasn’t the point, but in forming our little swap, we unwittingly created one of those mixed-aged play groups that Bridgers is always going on about. One thing that has become quite clear in witnessing the children in our little village interact with one another week in and week out is that the tendency for the older ones to take on a caring role for the younger ones emerges quite naturally. I will never forget watching one of the 5-year-olds in the group spend about 45 minutes feeding a two-year-old mac and cheese airplane style. No one asked her to do that.

My 8-year-old is the oldest child in our kid swap and, despite repeated reminders from me that it is my job and not hers to babysit the kids, she can’t seem to stop herself from taking on a maternal role in the crew. Funnily enough, by the time I gave birth to my now-6-week-old son, my daughters had clocked more hours holding babies in the previous year than I had. That’s because one of the other moms in our swap had a baby last year, and my daughters spend a whole lot of time at her house begging to hold her little one. This small-scale introduction to baby care has led to some hilarious conversations between me and my daughters over the past several weeks—let’s just say they do not hesitate to give me parenting advice. They even taught me a new burping method.

Only in a society heavily stratified by age and parenthood status, in which childrearing has become privatized and childhood cut-off from much of adult life, is my daughters’ experience unusual. It is not hard to imagine a society in which mixed-aged play and the caregiving experience that goes along with it is the norm. That goes for a lot of aspects of big-family life. As I write: “America would be a more family-friendly place if its culture more closely resembled that of a large family. If the effort of raising children was more broadly valued, if parenthood was more relaxed, if kids weren’t tucked away in gated playgrounds and schools, but were an ever-present aspect of daily life.” I suspect that in a society like that, people would not only want more children, but have the confidence to actually have them.