Anne Solaz

As you say, fertility has been falling in France for ten years now, and demographers have been investigating the reasons. It would seem that people’s desire to have children is itself affected as they confront contexts and constraints that may discourage them from becoming parents or growing their family, e.g., the economic situation, fear for the future, the climate, negative discourse on the educational system and, most recently, the quality of private-sector daycare in France. All of those situations are largely enough to lead young couples to hesitate before having children. Moreover, the norm according to which becoming a parent is somehow a necessary or required part of life is also changing. For the younger generation, self-fulfillment doesn’t necessarily include having children.   

Falling fertility is a fundamental trend, and perhaps major changes in family policy are not enough to stop or check it. If we look at changes in family policy in France over the last decades, we see that resources have been redirected toward relatively disadvantaged families—family policy benefits are less universal but more social. The fact is that declining fertility affects all parents, whatever their income, not only the relatively well off, who are the most affected by the aforementioned changes. Also, declining fertility is not specific to France; it is observed in almost all European countries, including northern ones that, like France, budget considerable resources for families. 

I don’t know if that reform aimed to influence fertility. In any case, it was not presented in that light. In fact it was designed to achieve a better mother-father parenting balance by setting aside part of parental leave for fathers.[1] But in practice fathers seldom use their now institutionalized paternal leave, and some mothers seem not to have taken the shorter maternal leave imposed by the reform. In fact, the reform accelerated mothers’ return to work or official unemployed status and therefore did not work as an incentive to grow the family. Still, we can view the shorter break from work after childbirth that the reform somewhat forced upon mothers in a positive light given the adverse effect of career interruptions and possible union dissolution on retirement pensions. 

Our research has shown the importance of having a dependable daycare solution for young children. Some parents obtain a slot in a daycare center [crèche] very shortly after their baby is born, thereby ensuring they can remain with that structure up to kindergarten—a reassuring long-term arrangement. Research has found that these parents have a second child somewhat more quickly than parents who turn to individual childminders [assistant[e]s maternel[le]s] or other types of daycare until the child turns 3.

Clearly, then, it is important to ensure that all daycare arrangements are stable. While daycare situation stability does not necessarily affect fertility levels, we do find it can slightly accelerate becoming parents for the first time or beyond. Parents who find themselves juggling different daycare arrangements—grandparents, babysitters—take more time to grow their families because it’s hard for them to imagine having another child with all the mental stress and financial burden it represents.

Using data from the DREES “Modes de Garde” survey, we compared the daycare structures and arrangements used by parents during the child’s first three years. This brings to light different childcare trajectories. We then looked at connections between those trajectories and probability of having another child. And indeed, children cared for continuously in collective daycare centers will have a sibling earlier than those cared for by an individual childminder. 

On the one hand, a new child of parents whose older child was already enrolled in a public collective daycare center is often automatically granted a slot in the same one; this in itself can incentivize parents to “accelerate.” On the other hand, although we were not able to measure the quality of the different types of daycare or parents’ assessments of them, parents’ situation can be slightly more uncertain with an individual childminder there are that individual’s vacation dates, possibly impending retirement, possible sick leaves, etc. Parents are sometimes less satisfied by having one individual to deal with when in a public-sector daycare center there is a whole team of daycare workers—a sort of collective guarantee of the team in charge. However, individual childminders also seem to provide fairly stable daycare: in general, children in that type of daycare remain there until they start school. Moreover, the differences between collective crèche and individual childminder are found only for parents’ second or most recent child, while the chances of their having another child is similar. 

Policies have done much with regard to daycare types and guaranteeing mothers’ employment. Perhaps they could focus more on society as a whole. Reflect on the position of families and children. Are they welcome everywhere? What about in public places? The places where people socialize seem compartmentalized. Some are reserved for families, whereas in others, families are less welcome. In trains, for example. General reflection on how to receive and be open to receiving children and families could be a way of supporting fertility. The decrease in people’s desire to have children is probably linked to today’s less powerful social norm around doing so. And we can view the fact that women and men now feel free either to have children or not as a positive development. However, if people who otherwise might wish to have children find themselves under constraints that incline them not to do so, then the state has a duty to help them by way of family policy that loosens those constraints.

[1] The 2015 reform was designed to share parental leave more evenly between parents having a second (or additional) child. This was done by reducing the length of paid leave that one parent could take from 36 to 24 months maximum while stipulating that the remaining 12 months can only be taken by the other parent.