If you take a vacation this summer to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other city, here’s one thing you won’t see much of: children.
Since the pandemic, the number of children under age 5 has fallen by more than 6% in large urban areas, according to new data from the Economic Innovation Group. This includes large drops in 2020, 2021, and still in 2022, when experts were hoping families would return to the city or that millennials would return to having children.
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Some readers may ask, why would anyone want to raise children in the city? Sure, Hell's Kitchen and Venice may never be the best family locales, but every major American city has great neighborhoods where millions of boys and girls have grown up. Cities can be, should be, and have been good places to raise children.
Young children are becoming a little bit rarer almost everywhere in America. The under-five population is down 3% in small cities since early 2020, down more than 2% in rural counties, and down 1.5% in suburban counties. All of these classes of counties saw fewer and fewer young children each of the past three years.
Only exurban counties — outer suburbs on the brink of the countryside — have maintained their population of 0-4-year-olds. In fact, the exurbs saw a 0.5% increase in 2022.
So what’s happening where the decline is most glaring?
The timeline gives us a couple of culprits: COVID and crime.
Cities were the places that closed schools the longest, that clamped down on public life the most, that locked playgrounds, canceled sports leagues, criminalized hanging out, and suspended summer camps. Of course parents would flee these places, and of course 20-and 30-somethings would be less excited to have babies in these places.
Raising children is an inherently social undertaking. Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters need mentors, coaches, teachers, neighbors, friends, babysitters — that is, community. The misanthropy of COVID-mitigation measures was pleasant for hermit-like misanthropes, but was hell for families, who, the numbers show, fled to greener pastures where youth sports were legal and schoolhouse doors were open.
The national crime wave of recent years, accelerated by the anti-social lockdowns and riots following the police killing of George Floyd, is concentrated in cities. Preachy "progressives" brag of their tolerance for crime (see the commentary against Daniel Penny for examples).
Urban school districts have also handed the reins to ideological extremists intent on indoctrinating children in radical new theories about sex and gender, while preaching race essentialism informed by critical race theory. Even left-leaning parents, if they’re normal, do not want to expose their children to this, and would prefer schools where the emphasis is on actual education.
Thus all sorts of parents flee to the exurbs.
Conservatives shouldn’t cheer this exodus, even if it does confirm our criticism of left-wing urban governance. It’s actually a sad development.
First, there’s the general sadness of the young urban leftists. They believe America is bad, they believe climate change will destroy human life, and they believe that each new human is bad for the planet. It’s tempting to say, “Well, I’m glad that these folks aren’t reproducing,” but it should concern us that they account for an increasingly large portion of our young urbanite populations.
A second worry is that their sadness is self-reinforcing. Cities and towns with fewer children are sadder, emptier, less purposeful places. Bottomless mimosas at brunch can make for a pleasant Sunday morning, but you can’t build a meaningful life around having no commitments or permanent connections.
This gets to the broadest worry. Our shrinking population isn’t just about parents moving away — it’s about babies not being born.
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The birthrate in the U.S. has been falling for 15 years and is well below the replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman. Nearly every year since 2007, the number of babies born has fallen, such that we already have fewer children than we did at the 2010 census. With the lockdowns’ anti-family effect this child shortage is especially acute with the youngest children.
It's a sick and declining society that doesn’t want to continue itself. America's cities today fit this bill.