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Why so few babies? We might have overlooked the biggest reason of all
Uncertainty – anxiety about the future is deterring people from parenthood.
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We live in an age of insecurity, which casts a shadow over young people's desire to have babies, says the writer.
ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
Anna Louie Sussman
Ms Raleigh Rivera and her husband spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they had been living since 2023, back to Ms Rivera’s home town, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.
They had planned to start trying when Ms Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated in 2025. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home-buyer credit, something Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting across the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back.
