Parenthood Conundrum: The Society That Cannot Afford Its Future

Imagine a prosperous nation as a single human being. It is highly educated, professionally accomplished and comfortably housed—though perhaps in an apartment too small for a family. Its diary is full, its mortgage is formidable and its sleep poor. It works late, travels when it can, and keeps a beloved pet. It has spent decades learning how to live longer, consume better, and protect itself from risk. Yet, when asked whether it will create and nurture new life, it hesitates.

The familiar accusation is that this “nation-person” has become selfish: it has chosen comfort over children, personal freedom over continuity, and a well-funded retirement over descendants. There is enough truth in that picture to make it unsettling. Individualism has weakened the old assumption that adulthood necessarily culminates in marriage and parenthood. Reliable contraception has separated sexuality from reproduction. People can now build identities that are not organised around the family. These are among modernity’s genuine freedoms, not pathologies to be cured.

But the accusation is also too easy. It confuses reluctance with indifference and choice with constraint. Many young adults are not rejecting children because they value restaurant meals, foreign holidays or dogs more highly. They are looking at the terms on which contemporary society offers parenthood and deciding—often sorrowfully—that they cannot meet them.

Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average fertility rate fell from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022, well below the replacement level of roughly 2.1 in the absence of migration. In 2024, the European Union’s rate reached 1.34. South Korea has recorded rates below one child per woman. Such numbers do not mean that a country disappears tomorrow; migration, longevity and demographic momentum complicate the picture. “Population collapse” is therefore an unnecessarily theatrical phrase. Yet, prolonged very low fertility does gradually alter almost everything: the ratio of workers to pensioners, the tax base, schools, healthcare, military recruitment, patterns of care and the emotional texture of communities.

What has changed? In an agrarian economy, children could contribute labour and eventually provide security in old age. In a modern city, they require years of expensive housing, childcare, education and supervision. This does not make a child a “financial liability”—the language is too cold for a human relationship—but it does make parenthood an immense private undertaking whose benefits are shared by society. Parents bear much of the cost; the future economy receives the workers, taxpayers and carers they raise.

Housing intensifies the contradiction. The cities with the greatest concentration of jobs are often those in which an additional bedroom is least affordable. Secure employment arrives later; home ownership, if it comes at all, comes later still. Partnership and marriage are postponed while young people assemble the minimum conditions of adult security. Biology, however, has not adjusted its timetable to the property market. By the time emotional, occupational and financial readiness converge, the reproductive window has narrowed. Some people who intended to have two children have one; some who intended one have none.

Women confront a further asymmetry. Education and employment have rightly expanded their freedom, but domestic life has not been redesigned everywhere to match. A woman may be told that she can have both a career and a family, only to discover that “both” means paid work followed by the larger share of childcare, household management and care for elderly parents. The penalty is not only exhaustion but also slower promotion and lower lifetime earnings. Societies that celebrate women’s entry into the workplace while quietly expecting the old division of labour at home have completed only half a revolution.

This is where psychology matters. Reproduction has not simply been suppressed by consumerism; it has been surrounded by anxiety. Parenthood is increasingly presented as an undertaking in which every decision carries enormous consequences. The good parent must optimise nutrition, schooling, emotional development, extracurricular achievement, digital exposure and future employability. Earlier generations certainly worried about their children, but contemporary “intensive parenting” converts love into continuous performance and surveillance. A child is no longer merely welcomed into a household; an entire life project must apparently be managed without error.

Meanwhile the future itself has become harder to trust. Precarious work, climate change, war, pandemics and political instability enter the most intimate calculation a couple can make: is this a world into which we should bring a child? The United Nations Population Fund’s 2025 survey across 14 countries found that nearly one in five adults of reproductive age believed they would be unable to have the number of children they wanted. Economic obstacles—insecurity, housing and childcare costs—were the most commonly cited barriers. One in five respondents said fears about the future would lead them to have fewer children than they desired. The central psychological fact, then, is not simply diminished instinct. It is diminished confidence.

The nation-person of our metaphor is not merely self-absorbed. It is burnt out. It has designed an external world of astonishing complexity while leaving the private work of sustaining life under-supported. It demands uninterrupted productivity during the years best suited to family formation. It treats care as sentiment rather than infrastructure. Then, surprised by empty nurseries, it offers a cash bonus and asks why citizens remain unconvinced.

Once low fertility persists, it can become self-reinforcing. Fewer children eventually mean fewer workers supporting more retired people. Taxes and care burdens may rise; younger adults feel still less secure; governments divert resources towards immediate geriatric needs; schools close and family-friendly communities thin out. Yet the “inverse pyramid” should not be used to portray older people as a burden. Longer life is a triumph, and healthy older citizens contribute work, care, memory and social stability. The problem is not that people live too long. It is that institutions have failed to adapt longevity, work and family life to one another.

Nor should women’s bodies become instruments of national economic policy. Attempts to shame the child-free, restrict reproductive rights, or romanticise compulsory motherhood are ethically objectionable and usually ineffective. Even generous baby bonuses seldom overcome unaffordable housing, insecure employment, unequal care and the absence of a trusted partner. The purpose of policy cannot be to manufacture babies for the labour market. It must be to make freely chosen parenthood genuinely possible.

That requires affordable homes large enough for families; stable work; paid leave for both parents; accessible childcare; flexible careers without a motherhood penalty; and a fairer division of domestic labour. It also requires fertility care, social acceptance of different family forms and immigration policies that recognise demographic reality. No single measure will restore an imagined golden age, nor should it. The aim is not to revive patriarchal duty but to remove the unreasonable penalties attached to raising the next generation.

India should resist the temptation to view this as a distant crisis of rich countries. The National Family Health Survey placed India’s total fertility rate at 2.0 in 2019–21, already below replacement level, with several states far lower. By 2050, people over 60 are projected to comprise more than one-fifth of India’s population. By 2046, they may outnumber children aged 15 and below. Kerala is already living part of that future: small families, outward migration and long life have produced households in which care is both indispensable and scarce.

The real warning from developed economies is not that prosperity inevitably destroys family life. It is that a society can become rich in options, yet, poor in conditions that make long commitments bearable. It can praise children in speeches while organising housing, employment and gender relations against those who might have them. It can confuse reproductive freedom with freedom from all social responsibility, and then discover too late that private choices accumulate into a public destiny.

If a nation were truly a thinking human being, it would recognise the conflict. It wants comfort, autonomy and security; it also wants continuity, care and a future. Maturity does not require abandoning the first set of goods for the second. It requires building a society in which they no longer cancel one another out. Civilisations survive not by commanding people to reproduce, but by becoming places in which hope is reasonable—and in which nurturing a new life does not demand the sacrifice of one’s own.

(Dr George John is a retired consultant psychiatrist from London, now living in Kochi, India. His special interests include interpersonal conflict, human flourishing and the philosophy of psychiatry)