Parenting Isn’t Easy — But Faith Might Help A Little
(ANALYSIS) As you may have heard, the United States is facing a looming fertility crisis.
Put simply, Americans are having fewer children. The total fertility rate (TFR) in the United States is currently 1.6 children per woman.
For comparison, it was 3.6 during the height of the Baby Boom. And this phenomenon is not just relegated to the United States, most advanced countries are experiencing something similar. In China, the TFR is down to one.
For comparison, a TFR of 2.1 is considered to be necessary to just maintain a country’s population. In Sweden it’s 1.4, and the Spanish fertility rate is 1.2. South Korea may have the lowest fertility rate on the planet right now – just 0.8 children per woman.
Of course, this could lead to all kinds of issues in the future with a primary concern being how these nations will fund their generous social safety net programs for senior citizens. Lots of experts have weighed in on possible policy changes that could boost overall fertility, but the general consensus that emerges from these experiments is that it's going to be tough to meaningfully increase fertility.
Those at the Institute for Family Studies suggest religion may be a key factor, connecting the rise of the unaffiliated with declining birth rates among the nonreligious.
The Association of Religion Data Archives recently posted an interesting dataset from the Pew Research Center that asks what should be a central question in this debate — do parents actually like being parents?
There’s a lot of chatter on social media about how folks with children are just miserable, but are those examples just outliers? And, are religious parents more likely to express satisfaction with their lives than non-religious ones?
You can the read the rest of this post at Ryan Burge’s Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.