The decline in the number of births should be seen in connection with the ‘gender divergence’ between increasingly progressive young women and increasingly conservative young men, observes economist Pauline Grosjean in her column.
The number of births has continued to decline in France in 2025. The fertility rate, at 1.56 children per woman, reached its lowest level since 1918. It is true that most of France’s neighbors are faring even worse, and France still holds its – rather relative – status as a champion of birth rates. This decline is a universal and long-term phenomenon, with explanations that have shifted over time.
The initial phase, which has been the most studied, is that of the demographic transition, marked by the shift from a regime of high mortality and fertility to one of low mortality and fertility. France was already an exception, having started its demographic transition in the 18th century, before other countries. Without this early transition, some economists estimate, France’s population would today stand at 250 million.
Okay, I spent all of my late teenage years to early adulthood in France so I feel I can chime in: French people, like most Westerners I’ve met, don’t know what they should do with their lives and the burden of responsibility of having children is simply not that appealing compared to having fun, either partying and doing coke or collecting figurines and dakimakuras. Even romance and love is fucked because marriage is seen as outdated and so serious so life long monogamy, for many, is just meh or scary. People don’t date for any objective, they just get together cause they’re lonely or sexually starved. And if they do understand what they should be doing, they’ll be old and weary, and either the psychological scars will stop them from fully commiting to something or biology will have done its thing and now you’re 42 trying to have your first kid, of course it’s gonna be difficult.
Now, whilst I have my value judgement on it, I’m not making any right now, I’m just describing what I’m seeing. Hedonism, consumerism, and an ideological vacuum, means that people won’t be making big commitments like having children. Of course the Muslims will, that makes sense, no surprise over there.
PS: and no, it’s not a financial thing. The immigrants with no support or family money that goes back several generations, working shitty min wage jobs, have and want to have children. It’s an ideological difference.
PS2: oh yeah and the current wave of redpill and casual misogyny on one side and “sexual liberation” and casual pornography on the other isn’t helping either. It just makes both sexes less interested and more cautious, even when there’s always good people in the bunch. That’s gonna have to be addressed as well.
I’m not going to debate you on your moral stance, nor on your conclusions.
But your own experience is a pretty narrow sample size and your generalization is pretty substantial. I don’t think you do justice to the diversity of people out there.
My personal experience with people in France is different, for example, I won’t tell you your argument is invalid over that, but it’s a sample size as big as your own, so it should be weighed.
If that’s causing the declining birthrate, why is the birthrate in North Korea dropping so rapidly?
What a terrible take. Having children doesn’t mean someone has their life figured out and has an objective in life. Lots of people have kids just because they think it’s something you should do. I keep reading articles about how more and more kids go to school without even most basic skills like climbing stairs. Parents just give them phones and ignore them. What objective did they have when they decided to have kids? At the same time people without kids don’t just have fun and do coke. Like, WTF? People pursue their interests, study, travel, volunteer… They don’t wake up when their 40 with psychological scars realizing they wasted their lives.
Some people have an idea about what to do with their lives and some don’t. Having kids has nothing to do with it.
Right?? We can’t afford coke
I’ve read recently that coke is really cheap now. €15,000/kg.
Well, if they don’t take parenthood seriously and just have kids because they’re not cautious or think “it’s the right time”, that’s not good, of course, but that doesn’t invalidate what I’m saying. Parenthood is the decision to make your entire life revolve around your lifelong project, a product of love. Where, even more so than with a partner, you discover the beauty and sweetness of giving, of selflessness, which is virtuous. For me, if you make the conscious decision not to have kids (biological, adopted, or even being the primary caretaker of a nephew for instance), you will never be a fully developed human being, because you never experienced what adulthood is really about: responsibility, and the pleasure of taking it. And of course if you’re a categorically bad parent, which kinda makes you a bad person altogether, you are this way because you’re not taking this responsibility seriously, and you’re also an incomplete human being.
And again, if this was the current Western mentality, these headlines wouldn’t be a thing. Now, whether you feel like every population, or even just the European one, should at least be healthily above replacement, or not, that’s something else. Personally, idc (perhaps I should but I haven’t thought about it much, ngl), but what I do know is that not prioritising childrearing, and not seeing it as a fundamental developmental milestone for every adult, are behind these falling birthrates.
No, you shouldn’t have kids until after you’re a fully developed adult…
If the your most impressive achievement is have kids to ride the coattails of, you probably didn’t do anything that important with your life.
This is the second example ITT of what I was talking about, lol. Again, you’re free to have your value judgment on parenthood, just like me. What’s undeniable, at least to me, is that the failing birthrates in “developed countries” have this, amongst other perhaps less relevant but still existing characteristics, at its core.
I read different takes on having kids before but this is just… wow. What you’re describing is some extremely idealized idea or parenthood that applies to maybe 1% of parents in the world. Most people have kids because they help with work and support you when your old. In developed countries most people have kids because culturally it’s just something you do, because it’s a status symbol, because they can’t afford birth control or simply because they are bored. For many parents it’s a completely selfish act, they just want something they can control and use to realize their unfulfilled dreams. At the same time every normal adult has to be responsible all the time, be it at work, with their friends, their partner. Thinking that taking care of a kid is the only way someone is truly responsible is just silly.
I don’t know what type of bubble you grew up in but real world doesn’t look the way you think it does. Different people have different ideas for life and having kids does not define anyone. Looking at everyone through the prism of parenthood is some really weird obsession.
1% ? Both my mom and my MIL are obsessed with me and my wife, respectively. Same with my brother, her brother. Like, that’s not true, that’s not what I’ve seen. My friends with kids are obsessed with them, some to the point of losing their minds on a regular basis in worry, lol. Idk man, I think you’re letting your bad, very geographically localized (like you said, “developed countries”) experience blind you to a wider, very different reality. And yes, for many, maybe the world’s majority, that’s how it goes. It doesn’t mean they won’t have their own psychological pathologies and forgo virtue at times, we’re talking about people here, but trust me that for them, having children is their dream come true, the main one, and they would literally rather die than lose them or anything too tragic come to them.
Yeah, if we’re talking Korea, Japan, France, Germany, etc, things are different, but that’s due to a mixture of trauma and an ideology that rejects responsibility and doesn’t value parenthood as much as it values the way less stressful “fun” (which in this case, is sweet labour, but whatever), and you’re talking from that perspective so of course we disagree on the value of parenthood, but you cannot disagree (or haven’t yet, at least) that those very beliefs are what’s at the core of the failing birthrates… which is all I was trying to talk about here, tbh, I wasn’t expecting this long of an exchange regarding virtue, parenthood and Western values. 😅 It was nice but I just came from a long shift, lol.
I will explicitly disagree with you here
What you’re pointing to as the cause - changing perceptions of children, and them no longer being seen as a milestone - is simply a symptom of the root cause: Children are no longer a boon. They’re now a burden
This what the poster above you was saying. Children used to be valuable as a source of labor, and to provide for you when you can no longer work
I don’t think this is the only cause, but I do think it’s the primary reason for the shift in mentality