Let’s clear up some confusion often conveyed by the media.

A headline for an article borrowed from The Epoch Times reads, “US Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low.” The headline for the actual article on The Epoch Times more accurately reads, “Births in US Increase as Fertility Rate Drops.”

People often confuse birth rates with fertility rates. The Encyclopedia Britannica makes the distinction between the two in simple language. Birth rates measure the actual number of babies born in a given year. Fertility rates are the average number of children born to women during their reproductive years. The Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to say:

The single most important factor in population growth is the total fertility rate (TFR). If, on average, women give birth to 2.1 children and these children survive to the age of 15, any given woman will have replaced herself and her partner upon death. A TFR of 2.1 is known as the replacement rate.

In 2024, there was an uptick in the number of live births, but overall fertility rates continued sinking. In short, we’re not replacing ourselves.

We’re often given misleading explanations for this decline. Many experts and the media cite the high cost of raising a child as the chief reason for America’s declining fertility rate, which now stands well below replacement level at slightly less than 1.6 children per woman. This financial burden, as The Epoch Times article mentions, is a chief impediment to motherhood.

Yet a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year found that “about a third of adults ages 50 and older who don’t have children say they never wanted to have them.” At the same time, a majority of adults under 50 say they’re unlikely ever to have children because “they just don’t want to.”

Given that we live in the age of the selfie, these answers seem reasonable. When you’re looking out for #1, the last thing you want is a kid. Changing many hundreds of diapers per child, lost sleep time, once relaxing evenings now shattered by colic or vomiting, having to load and unload the child into a car even for a simple trip to the grocery store: those are just a few of the trials dumped on you by an infant.

“A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic,” Ralph Waldo Emerson allegedly said, a quote describing the next stage of the game, and before you know it, you’ve got all the problems that come with teenagers. With all these negatives, it’s a wonder babies are born at all.

Until you become a parent yourself.

As a father of four children, and a granddad of 24 and counting, let me introduce you to the joys children bring that you rarely find as a counterbalance in all these reports.

Holding your newborn son or daughter in your arms for the first time. The first smile. The first words. The hugs and kisses from a 14-month-old. The first steps. A first trip to the library together. The hero’s greeting you get when you walk through the door after a hard day’s work. Kicking a soccer ball around in the driveway with the five-year-old. The countless goofy or brilliant things a child says growing up that you later wish you’d written down. The graduations. The weddings. The victories and defeats that follow when they leave home and go out into the world.

On and on it goes, from day one in the neonatal ward all the way into their adulthood, a never-ending reality show belonging to you alone. And then you’re a grandparent, and the roles change and the joy deepens as you exchange all the responsibilities and weights you bore as a parent for the sheer pleasure of hanging out with a two-year-old granddaughter or a high school grandson.

Please don’t misunderstand me. If you’re one of the 57% of adults under 50 who don’t want to have kids because you just don’t want to, then you shouldn’t have them. I still remember my mother’s burst of laughter when, before my first child, a little girl, was born, I said that I didn’t think a baby would change my life very much. Have a child, and believe me, your life will never be the same!

But you should at least know the joys and pleasures you’re missing as well as the burdens, responsibilities, and yes, sorrows of parenthood. Like any sane person my age, I regret mistakes I’ve made and wrongs I’ve done, but my children and grandchildren are the best thing that ever happened to me. They’ll be my real monuments when I’m gone, not a stone over my grave. In spite of all my mistakes in raising them, they’re my greatest gifts to the world.

Think about it.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Negative Space