Norway’s generous parental leave, heavily subsidised childcare and high living standards have earned it a reputation as one of the best places in the world to have children. And yet fewer than ever are being born in the Nordic country.
Although falling birthrates are a global trend, such is the concern in Oslo the government has commissioned a birthrate committee to investigate the causes and possible consequences and devise strategies to reverse the population’s current trajectory.
Over the last two decades, Norway’sfertility rateplummeted from 1.98 children for each woman in 2009 to 1.40 in 2023, a historic low. This is despite a parental leave policy that entitles parents to 12 months of shared paid leave for the birth, plus an additional year each afterwards.
If current fertility trends continue, the sparsely populated country of nearly 5.5 million people could face wide-ranging consequences ranging from problems caring for the elderly to a reduced labour force.
Factors contributing to the decline include housing costs, postponing having children until ones 30s, fewer people having more than two children, and an increase in those not having children at all.
“It is uncertain what the cohort fertility of the younger generations will be, but the trend is downward,” said the Norwegian minister for children and families, Lene Vågslid. “Norway is among the countries where birthrates have dropped the most over the past 10 to 15 years,” she said.
As well as leading to “long-term societal changes”, low birthrates could, she said, “eventually weaken the social model and the intergenerational contract”.
The birthrate committee’s chair, Rannveig Kaldager Hart, said there had been a “tempo shift” among Norwegians in their 20s and 30s, leading to a fall in overall births.
“There is a really marked fall among young adults in their 20s, both in their early and their late 20s,” she said from her office at the University of Oslo. “And then there was a long-term increase [in births] among adults in their 30s, but now that has stalled or even reversed.”
Kaldager Hart, an associate professor at the university’s department of health economics and health management and a fertility researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said the changes among both age groups were important.
“If you just look at the baseline, it’s very easy to just focus on the 20s picture,” Kaldager Hart said. “If Norwegians have a child, they often have one more. But then there also used to be a fair share that had three kids and that’s become less common.” A lack of time and more women working full-time are both factors, but another is the rise of “intensive parenting”.
This is a shift away from informal family-based responsibility for raising children, where parents followed their intuition, to a more child-centred, expert-informed approach, where parents pour in more time, emotion and financial investment to ensure the success of their children for which they feel personally responsible.
“If you want to follow each child very closely and take them to their activities and all these things that you’re supposed to do, then maybe it’s just easier to have two children than to have three,” said Kaldager Hart.
Raquel Herrero-Arias, an associate professor specialising in parenting at the University of Bergen, said there had been “a clear intensification of parenting” in recent years. “Raising children has become more demanding, more complex and more expansive, involving tasks and responsibilities that were not traditionally associated with the parental role.”
Intensive parenting, she added, “promotes the idea of parental determinism – that parents are the primary architects of their children’s future” – rather than structural issues such as poverty, employment, discrimination or housing.
Despite Norway’s family-friendly policies, this cultural expectation could make parenthood seem less appealing.
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“These policies aim to support work-family balance, but if the cultural expectations of parenting remain so demanding, then no amount of policy support may feel sufficient,” said Herrero-Arias.
“In other words, unless we rethink what we expect from parents, even the best policies may fall short,” she said.
The birthrate committee is the first of its kind since the 1980s, when fertility was also very low in Norway and efforts were made to better combine work and family and gender equality, which led to the “Nordic model” of family-friendly policies andan increase in the country’s birthrate.
The committee has just published its interim findings, where it recommendsadditional child allowance for parents under 30 and extra support and partial student loan forgiveness for students under 30 who have children,and will publish a full report in February. Next it will look at the impact of rising housing costs and what interventions could be made there.
Unlike the cost of childcare, which is falling in Norway, the rising cost of owning a home is thought to be a barrier to having children because many aspiring parents see it as a prerequisite.
Twenty-two-year-old Marita Løkken, a special needs education student at Oslo University, said she wanted to have two or three children in the future, and was not surprised that birthrates were falling because of the length of time it took to get on the career ladder.
“To have a bachelors [degree] is just not worth anything when you’re looking for a job, then you have to study for even longer and then people wait even longer [to have children]. So it isn’t surprising at all,” said Løkken.
“If the circumstances were different, I think more people would have had kids,” said Løkken. “Money is tight for a lot of people, especially as inflation now is crazy. It’s a lot of things coming together. It’s difficult.”
A society with fewer children was not only bad for a country’s future prospects, but aslo had a marked impact on society, said Kaldager Hart.
It can shift resources from schools to care homes, for example, meaning children might have to travel a long way to go to school. “A society with very few children can also be a society where it’s harder to be a child.Childrencontribute something to the lives of their parents but also to the life of society,” she said.