Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR’s series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.
Ashley and Nick Evancho say raising their 3-year-old, Sophia, is one of the most joyous things they’ve ever done. “Watching my daughter run around in the yard is otherworldly for me,” Ashley said on a recent afternoon in their home in Grand Island, a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y.
But the Evanchos also made a decision that’s increasingly common for families in the U.S. and around the world: One is enough.
“I don’t need another one. I don’t want another one. I love having only one child,” said Ashley Evancho, who works as a financial planner.
Her husband, Nick, an Episcopal priest, agreed that big families make less sense in today’s economy. “It really stacks the chips economically against you,” he said.
Worldwide, the number of children born to the average family has dropped by more than half since the 1970s, according to the latest United Nations data. Economists say having fewer children is the norm for many families, especially in relatively prosperous countries like the U.S.
The trend is leading to populations that are dramatically older, and beginning to shrink, in many of the world’s biggest economies.
“This demographic issue is poised to potentially remake so much of our society,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame.
Experts say a rapidly aging and gradually shrinking population in the world’s wealthiest countries could force sweeping changes in people’s lives, causing many to work longer before retirement, making it harder for business owners to find employees and destabilizing eldercare and health insurance programs.
Already, women in the 15 countries that account for 75% of global gross domestic product, including the U.S., are having too few children to maintain a stable population. Many of those nations have fallen into the “very low” category of “total fertility rate” identified by the U.N. as a serious concern.
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“For the countries below 1.4 births per woman, we see much faster population decline and a pronounced shift in the population age distribution to the older ages,” said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.’s chief population scientist. The rate of births per woman in the U.S. dropped to 1.6 in 2024, the lowest ever.
In China, Japan, Italy and South Korea, deaths already outpace births. Demographers say more high-income countries would face population decline, if not for high rates of immigration.
“We seem to be kind of watching a science fiction novel,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
According to Eberstadt, worker shortages, shrinking numbers of young consumers and a growing wave of elderly retirees relying on pension and health care systems could challenge basic assumptions about global capitalism. This trend is being heightened by the fact that people in the U.S. and many other countries are living longer. The global population of people age 80 or older will triple between 2020 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
“Turning the population pyramid upside down basically upsets the business model, the background music, that we’ve had in modern life for as long as we can remember,” he said.
In one U.S. town, plenty of jobs and few young workers
In the U.S., the world’s largest economy, this trend has been building for decades. Families started shrinking in the 1960s, when the average American woman had between three and four children.
Now, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank data, the typical woman will have one or two children in her lifetime, with a growing number of families opting for no children at all.
“I think it raises questions about do we want to be a more dynamic, forward-looking economy where people are optimistic about the future and about their ability to have kids?” said Kearney at Notre Dame.
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With fewer children being born, population growth in the U.S. has already slowed. The population is expected to begin shrinking later this century, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Americans are also significantly older, with the median age rising from 28.1 in 1970 to a record high last year of 39.1.
Many communities, especially in rural America, already face serious demographic challenges.
“The decline here you see started a long time ago,” said Jeremy Evans, head of the Franklin County Industrial Development Agency in rural upstate New York.
Franklin County, which lies near the U.S.-Canada border, has lost roughly 10% of its population since 2010. Some of that is due to young people leaving, but so few babies are born here that the local hospital closed its maternity ward three years ago.
According to Evans, there are plenty of good jobs, with an unemployment rate of just 3.8%, but not enough workers to fill them. “It became obvious: We have to make this the No. 1 focus,” he said. “Our No. 1 mission is [attracting] 18-to-39-year-olds,” he said.
But economists say recruiting young people will get harder nationwide as smaller families continue to transform the American population. Last year, the number of children in the U.S. declined slightly, while the number of seniors surged to 61 million.
Eberstadt, at the American Enterprise Institute, thinks the population shift could destabilize key U.S. programs that underpin the economy, including Social Security and Medicare.
“The way public finances are organized makes no sense if you’re heading into an aging, shrinking world,” he said.
Many experts told NPR the shift toward an older, smaller population with fewer working-age residents will accelerate, if the U.S. maintains strict new limits on migrants imposed by the Trump administration.
For America’s trading partners, a demographic cliff
If this demographic earthquake were only reshaping the U.S. economy, researchers say it would already pose serious challenges. But rapid aging and population decline are hitting America’s biggest trading partners far harder and much faster.
“If you live in Europe or parts of Asia, this [population shift] is everything,” said Lant Pritchett, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
He noted that basic assumptions about capitalism and economic growth evolved when nearly every country was experiencing rapid population increases. Now that era is over.
“Hard to tell what’s going to happen when things that have never happened before happen. We just don’t have any examples of countries doing this successfully,” Pritchett said.
This population shift is happening fastest and on the largest scale in China, the world’s second-biggest economy. According to Pritchett, China’s working-age population will crash by 2050, losing more than 211 million workers.
On a recent morning outside one of Beijing’s busy shopping malls, it was hard to see the massive change underway here. But Mia Li, 20, who works in China’s struggling real estate sector, said she’s already feeling it.
“Housing prices will fall and the number of homebuyers will decrease as well,” Li said. She doesn’t have children and worries that motherhood would be expensive and risky. “Having children requires financial support, but if the economy goes down, how can you possibly afford to raise them?”
Xiujian Peng, an expert on China’s population at Victoria University in Australia, said the economic impact of the trend could be profound.
“Population will decline very fast,” she said, adding that vast areas of rural China, home to many of the country’s elderly, could face “a huge problem.”
Fears of a backlash as countries adapt to fewer children
Some researchers, including Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, think fears about shrinking families are overblown. Goldin described much of the concern as a political backlash against high rates of immigration and women’s empowerment.
Asked about economic impacts of an aging, declining workforce, Goldin said, “I am not worried about that. Scarcity is everywhere; trade-offs are everywhere. There is no optimal birth rate.”
But many economists believe nations, and companies, that hope to remain stable and prosperous through this transition need to begin adapting. Some may be able to compensate by attracting more migrant workers or boosting the efficiency of the labor force through education, automation and AI.
Experts: Small families here to stay
Many countries are also rolling out programs designed to encourage a return to larger families. The Trump administration included a modest package of incentives in this year’s budget, including an expanded child tax credit and a temporary program offering $1,000 investment accounts to babies born during Trump’s current term.
Some governments are going much further. Last month, the Greek government approved a multibillion-dollar tax package aimed at slowing Greece’s rapid depopulation.
“This is an existential problem for us,” Greece’s minister of economy and finance, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, said in an interview with NPR.
But many experts are skeptical of policies aimed at boosting birth rates. Past programs have shown limited or no success, apparently because much of the trend toward fewer children is driven by improvements in society — from economic progress for women to declining teen pregnancies.
“One thing about [smaller families] is that it’s all accounted for by good things, which means it’s not turning around,” said Pritchett, at the London School of Economics.
Ashley Evancho, the financial planner and mom who lives near Buffalo, agrees families like hers aren’t likely to have more kids, even if governments offer incentives and benefits.
“My opportunity cost, the opportunity cost to my career or my education [of having more children] is so much higher,” she said. “So the economy, the way it works, will probably have to fundamentally change.”
Reporting contributed by Jasmine Ling, NPR Beijing producer.
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