Almost every day now, there is another headline warning about the collapsing birth rate across the developed world, and along with it, another think piece attempting to diagnose why younger generations seem increasingly reluctant to build families.
This week, new figures out of England and Wales showed that the number of babies being born has fallen to the lowest level since 1977, with couples delaying parenthood until their thirties or deciding against children altogether. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.39 children per woman, the lowest level ever recorded.
The explanations offered for this phenomenon tend to revolve around economics, and certainly there is truth to them. Housing costs have exploded, and traditional childcare routes are expensive. Due to the ever-shifting nature of our economy, many young adults feel professionally unstable and financially precarious.
Writing earlier this month in The New York Times, Anna Louie Sussman argued that declining fertility is tied not merely to finances, but to a broader sense of existential instability permeating modern life. As she put it: “Many of the forces our economy is built on — AI, immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care.”
There’s no question that younger generations feel anxious about the future; but this has been the case for most of human history.
What’s interesting is that post-WWII, there was a baby boom, not a bust. Even in the face of uncertainty, after years of devastating war and the Holocaust, those of childbearing years were investing in the future and bought in by bringing more children into the world.
The modern situation is far less uncertain, and yet, this is the time we’re witnessing a cratering birth rate.
The difference between then and now is the prevailing feeling of hope that previous generations felt and is now absent in our modern discourse. Much of the current pessimism centers on the very future of our world and the sustainability of human life on our planet.
We’re beginning to learn the truth about these messages. New reporting indicates that much of the climate anxiety shaping millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward the future was manufactured through years of exaggerated predictions, catastrophic media framing, activist incentives and scientific models that are now being quietly reconsidered or outright abandoned.
For over a decade, one of the most influential climate scenarios in the world was the United Nations-backed RCP8.5 pathway, an extreme emissions projection that became the basis for thousands upon thousands of academic studies, media reports, activist campaigns, educational materials and political arguments. It has been routinely treated not as a worst-case hypothetical, but as the expected future itself.
Entire generations of children absorbed that messaging constantly. They were told the planet was on the brink of collapse. They sat through school lessons, television shows and museum exhibits warning about irreversible catastrophe and societal breakdown.
Climate anxiety became not merely understandable but fashionable and morally valorized. Young people openly discussed whether having children was ethical in a world that is dying.
But now, quietly, the scientific and institutional conversation is shifting.
Even the UN’s climate bodies have begun moving away from relying so heavily on RCP8.5, acknowledging what critics had argued for years: that the assumptions driving many of the most catastrophic forecasts were implausibly extreme.
That reversal matters enormously, because the emotional and cultural consequences of those predictions did not remain confined to scientific journals or policy conferences. They filtered into schools, therapy offices, social media activism, entertainment media and the psychological architecture of an entire generation.
You can’t overstate the scale of the institutional machinery behind this messaging. Universities, NGOs, green energy firms, activist organizations, consultants, media outlets, carbon-credit markets, political movements and academic departments all developed enormous financial and ideological incentives around maintaining a sense of escalating crisis. Fear became economically useful.
Entire careers and industries emerged around convincing the public that catastrophe was not merely possible, but imminent.
Children growing up with this constant drumbeat of looming disaster bore the worst psychological burden of that messaging.
Climate activism itself was increasingly presented not simply as civic participation, but as emotional coping. The American Psychiatric Association has openly discussed “climate emotions” and recommended activism, climate groups, rituals and therapeutic narrative reframing as mechanisms for processing eco-anxiety. In other words, rather than encouraging young people to critically evaluate whether the underlying assumptions driving their fear were rational, institutions often encouraged them to immerse themselves more deeply in what was driving their anxiety.
A society that relentlessly teaches its young people that catastrophe is around the corner should not be shocked when they become fearful about building families, investing in permanence, or imagining hopeful futures.
We cannot undo the anxiety already instilled in an entire generation, but we can stop deepening it. We can become more honest about scientific uncertainty, more skeptical of institutions that benefit politically and financially from public panic, and more careful about the emotional burden we place on children in the name of activism.
Once people lose faith in the future, they eventually stop creating the next generation meant to inherit it.
