Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high. Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare.
But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere.
This is a puzzle for Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute. A sociologist and demographer, she is one of Europe’s experts on how young people view having children. In 2020 and 2021, she advised then Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin on reinvigorating the country’s birth rate.
Across the world, fertility is declining in very different societies — conservative and liberal, big and small state, growing economies and stagnating ones. Even India — known for its growing population — now has fewer births per woman than the theoretical replacement rate of 2.1. In Europe in 2023, the rate fell in “Hungary, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, all the ones who were really high or were paraded as examples . . . It seems that Finland might be a forerunner, unfortunately.”
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said the birth rate is a “top priority”. French President Emmanuel Macron this month promised “demographic rearmament”. But Rotkirch cautions that their efforts are likely to underwhelm. “When you work with politicians, you always see the same things. ‘Oh yes, we should have one month’s more paternity leave!’ All the scholars are like: you should, but it won’t change anything.”
Europe’s policy challenge, she wrote recently, is “to prevent a [fertility] freefall as witnessed in many East Asian countries”. Yet policies that worked last century may not work today. Some are likely to cost huge sums without delivering the desired results.
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
At the Family Federation, Rotkirch oversees a unique series of surveys, which ask young people not how many children they are planning to have, but how many they would ideally like to have.
Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’ life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”
This helps to explain why it is no longer Europeans with less education who want more children. Instead “those who are well-off in many ways — [who] have a partner, have support from their parents, are employed, are not lonely — want to have more children . . . This is quite a new thing in many countries, including England.”
The phenomenon inverts the theory of “uncertainty reduction”, which held that people, particularly from poorer backgrounds, had children to shore up their lives. “[The idea was:] my career isn’t going well, my relationships are a bit here and there, but at least I have a child . . . You just don’t see that way of thinking any more. For millennials, uncertainty reduction is not to have children.”
Rotkirch also suspects that the spread of social media is playing a role, not least by stoking political polarisation, loneliness and mental health issues, which reduce fertility.
Stabilising birth rates may require not just top-down policies but a societal rethink. “What would society look like if we valued reproduction, and raising babies, not just your own, as much as [economic] production?”
Until recently, fertility decline was driven by families having fewer children than their parents and grandparents. Now the key dynamic is childlessness. In Finland, three-quarters of the recent decline in fertility is attributable to people who have no children. “You see similar trends everywhere.”
In the family barometer surveys, among Finns born in the late 1970s and 1980s, fewer than one in twenty said at the age of 25 that they didn’t want to have children. Among those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that proportion rose to nearly one in four.
Nearly 40 per cent of Finnish men with low education are now childless at the age of 45 (and probably for life): a “huge” proportion. Most have no partners. Men are as likely as women to say they want children, but are more likely to be childless.
To address this would require looking at ways of family formation, says Rotkirch: better jobs, more affordable housing, and clear signals that those who take parental leave won’t face workplace discrimination.
But childlessness is also rising among those who are in a relationship. Many couples are waiting too long. “People call me a lot in Finland. [They say] ‘I’m 42, my partner has had three miscarriages and she says she will not continue. And I understand I will never be a father. I’m the only child of my parents, and there’s nobody left, and help me.’”
Rotkirch is wary of an emphasis on fertility treatments. Women’s fertility drops in their late thirties and forties: society has to adapt. “If you do everything that typical ministers of finance tell you to do, you are 45 — you have a house and a doctorate and it’s too late. The idealised life course is really at odds with female reproductive biology.”
When today’s parents were at school, family planning meant avoiding teenage pregnancies. In Finland, they have for years been a non-issue.
Rotkirch suggests the focus now needs to be elsewhere. Many people who want to have kids are not having kids. “It’s so funny when you meet young people and they’re like, ‘I have so much to do, my schedule is so busy.’ They are really waiting for the time when they are not busy.
“When you tell young people when they should start [on average] having their first child if they plan to have, for example, two with sensible birth intervals and without resorting to IVF, they tend to be very surprised.”
She supports Macron’s proposal of free fertility check-ups for 25-year-olds and, more broadly, normalising conversations about fertility. “You should absolutely not ask a person out of the blue, you should be very sensitive, but it’s not bad to be curious about other people’s reproduction.”
Governments should also not tell young people to have babies for the sake of the economy. Instead, they should flip the message to reassure young people about the future: “The economy is there for you to have a baby.”
Rotkirch’s online CV notes that she took three “parental leaves of around 12 months each”. She delighted in having children and has studied the concept of “baby longing”.
She respects people’s choice not to have children and says that “many people can be perfectly happy without becoming a parent”. (The real impact of wellbeing tends to come from not having a partner.) But she implies young people might decide differently, if the social discussion changed.
“It’s OK to say I don’t like children, and it’s the only demographic you can ever say that about.” When she asked her students to guess the results of surveys of parents, they wildly underestimated how satisfied the parents were — including with their relationships and their ability to take care of their kids.
In her 2021 policy guidelines for the Finnish government, Rotkirch wrote that the “goal should be to restore the birth rate to 1.6 in the short term and 1.8 in the longer term”. Instead the rate fell further — to 1.27 in 2023. Now, “given how few of the currently childless intend to have children”, Finland could at best aim for a recovery to 1.4 by the end of the decade.
Rotkirch is exasperated by those who think lower fertility rates should be welcome, given climate change. “Climate change has to be combated now, and if you look at fertility changes, they are long term.”
Nor can immigration simply fill the gap. “There are many good reasons not to have kids, but importing Filipino workers, who leave their children behind, is seriously not the answer.
“There are two things that politicians should not do. One is the very knee-jerk reaction: go back to some last-century policies.” This includes restrictions on contraception and abortion, as seen in Poland and Iran. “The other thing is just to close their eyes.”
Rotkirch’s hope is that the downsides of very low fertility rates may become better understood. If there is one reason to think that rates might stabilise or rebound, it is that past trends have yo-yoed unpredictably. In one survey, 11 per cent of Finnish women said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made them less likely to have children. Perhaps Europe could experience positive shocks in future.
Rotkirch is hopeful that homeworking may encourage couples to have children: men are more likely to be around for childcare. Or perhaps as AI takes hold, people will have more interest in children — because they are no longer needed in the workforce or want to reaffirm their humanity. “That would be very nice.”
Rotkirch is not scared by the future, but she doesn’t want to live in a society of old, lonely people. “I think it’s sad if our way of living is living alone on the screens, in the flats, not having sex, not having stable partnerships, not having children.”
