Pandemic and uncertainty of the future make parents give up on having more children

Two children had always been Anna Carey’s plan, and in early 2020 she was getting ready to try to conceive. Her daughter had just turned 2, and she and her husband were living happily, albeit away from their family, in Toronto, Canada, where Carey worked part-time at a marketing company.

Of course, we all know what happened next.

With no safe daycare options during the pandemic, Carey was forced to quit her job in August 2020 to care for her daughter. What had seemed almost right a few months ago now seemed unthinkable.
“We couldn’t imagine going through another pregnancy, birth and newborn stage with so few options for support,” she said.

For a while, she still hoped that the situation would improve before her 35th birthday in July of this year. For genetic health reasons she and her husband Graham have always considered age a cut-off point.

The final straw, however, was to see, during the pandemic, the clear lack of structural support for families. Now, Carey said, she feels sad but resolute in her decision. “The new realization of how little society values ​​children and fathers — especially mothers — in any way beyond rhetoric was a huge drag.”

effective birth control

Certainly, many people had babies during the pandemic. Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, whose concerns about daycare presumably differ from most people’s, will soon have three.

But for some older millennials who already had one or more children before the pandemic, the very real risks of having a child at one of the worst times in recent history have proven to be an effective form of birth control.

Crawling through pandemic life, with all of its unpredictable setbacks and derailments — not to mention moments of existential terror — felt similar to postpartum life, but without the bright side of an adorable baby.

Add a real newborn to the recipe? Forget it, some say, at least for now — and probably forever. (It is also worth noting that there has long been a gap between the number of children Americans say they want and the number they end up having.)

There is another, more direct aspect of pandemic birth control: declining fertility. While many aspects of life seem to have been on hold for two years now, time has continued to tick by, a significant consideration for people who have had their late 30s go down the drain while gaining dubious new skills like Zoom and homemade bread.

What may have seemed an exciting possibility to some at 38, seems, at 40, another daunting set of fiscal and, for women, physiological hurdles to overcome.

There are also pandemic divorces. Percentages rose across the US after the first year of the pandemic (although it is difficult to say, of course, whether this relates to the pandemic; the increase could be a result of court closures). For parents of young children who haven’t come out of the pandemic with their relationships intact, the prospect of having more children seems far less likely than before.

That was the case for Tully Mills, 40, a former chef and illustrator who lives in Longmont, Colorado, with her 2.5-year-old daughter.

“The reality of not having a second child gradually confirmed itself after the first year of Covid,” he said. “Everything was so uncertain and survival mode was kicking in.” He and his ex-partner are now happy parents, but he can’t imagine having any more children, even with a future partner.

The Epidemic in the Shadow

There is still a shadow of the epidemic in the burnout of parents who lived in 2020 and 2021 with children who were too young even to be distracted by screens. The prospect of having more babies can seem especially unpleasant for parents who are still recovering from taking on unexpected tasks without recognition or social support.

For months in the spring and early summer of 2020, before data on the relative safety of outdoor activities became available, most playgrounds in North America were closed, along with schools and day care, except for essential workers. .

In urban areas, children were allowed to play in public parks and on the sidewalk, but most of the time they were stuck in small spaces with their parents and siblings for months. The impact of this time on parents of young children is still unfolding.

Demographers have known for years that the US birth rate is falling, with causes that range from the extremely obvious — student debt, poverty, climate change — to purely speculative.

It is undeniable, however, that the pandemic caused an immediate drop in births: in December 2020, about nine months after Covid began, births were down by about 8% – the biggest decline of any month in that very challenging year – in compared to the same month of the previous year.

Whether the instability and catastrophic lack of childcare that many families have since experienced reduced fertility in general will not be quantifiable for a few more years.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves