One of the reasons I love being a human geography teacher is because the concepts I teach provide understandings that seem to make the complexities of the world seem a lot less complex. And so many of the concepts you learn in this course describe parts of life you’re already familiar with. This is one of them.

Most of you are around 15 years old, give or take a year. In some parts of the world, or times in our history, that would be close to the age females begin having children. Statistically speaking, the earlier a female begins having children, the more children they will have over their lifetime. The opposite is also true; the longer someone waits to have children, the fewer children they will have in their lifetime. If you do choose to have children, it may be likely that you wait until you have graduated college, begin your career, and get to a place where you feel financially ready for a family. When you do have children, it’s more likely that you have 1 to 3 kids and unlikely that you will have more than 5 children.

The Role of Gender Equality & Education

This is a direct and natural outcome of ensuring equal educational opportunities for all genders. As countries ensure girls stay in school and provide post-secondary education (college), they will see lower birthrates, less poverty, and growing economies. Almost like a “heal the world” doctor prescription. Facing high birthrates and poverty? Provide education for girls.

Better education leads to better economic opportunities, and better economic opportunities lead to fewer children, who will also receive better education and better economic opportunities. This cycle emerges that leads to developed economies, less extreme poverty, and smaller families.

As countries develop, children become more expensive. There’s childcare, education, healthcare–just ask your parents, you are expensive!

In the United States we’ve seen this happen for some time now, and a new trend is emerging as illustrated in the graph below.

As countries develop, birthrates continue to fall. Each generation tends to have fewer children (overall) than the previous generation. Today in the United States, it is common for people my age (millennials) to choose NOT to have children. That was very uncommon for my parents’ generation.

As this trend continues for a few generations, the overall population begins to age. Because of healthcare advances and standard of living improvements, people live longer lives. A population begins to age when a population gradually has a larger percentage of older non-reproductive age individuals who are dependent on the working age cohorts to survive.

Aging populations can create economic problems for a country. It becomes harder to find workers needed to keep an economy running, and with fewer workers, there are fewer consumers spending money to keep all of those businesses running and fewer individuals paying taxes.

Japan has faced this problem for decades, evidenced by their population pyramid from 2023 below.

They have come to rely increasingly on technology and automation to fill the labor gaps created by their aging population. An American tourist in Japan might remark on the touchscreens instead of people when ordering food or buying items like clothing or electronics from a vending machine.

Japan isn’t the only country facing this issue. The episode clip below of PBS Newshour illuminates how an aging baby boom population affects us at home.

Pro-natalist Policies

There are two ways to lower a country’s dependency ratio (well, I guess there are three ways, but one of them takes a Thanos approach, so that’s out). A country can encourage immigration or its population to have children.

Pro-natalist policies encourage a population to have more children and can include:

• propaganda in the form of government sponsored advertisements and political policy platforms
• tax breaks and tax credits for parents with multiple children
• government subsidized childcare and paid parental leave
• family planning assistance
• housing subsidies
• funding for education and college
• cost of living support for families (food, transportation, utilities)

Since the 1970s, the United States has had a birthrate that falls below the replacement rate but has not had to take a drastic pro-natalist policy approach because we are a destination country for immigration. Immigration waves from Mexico and other Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s made up for the low birthrates and kept the dependency ratio, the economy, and the taxable stable. If you have a family member who immigrated to the United States during this time, your family helped the country avoid the aging population crisis.