Why aren't Finnish women having babies?

Finland is a type of utopia when it comes to family policies and the general ease of raising children there:

To name a few benefits, Finnish moms get a free baby box for each child (a year’s worth of free high-quality clothing and necessary items for the baby), Finnish parents get 14 months of paid leave combined, plus moms get 40 days of paid leave before birth, maternal care is free, pediatric care is mostly free, and quality daycare comes with a minimal cost. Working hours and culture make combining kids and a career a breeze (at least compared to the US), and cities and towns are built so that even young children can play, roam, and go from place to place independently and freely.

Yet Finland’s birth rate is now lower than in 1776—since records began—at 1.25 children per woman, one of the lowest rates in Europe. Why?

Many of you who follow my Instagram account asked me to write about this.

My unhinged theory is that we can’t think of family policies affecting birth rate; they lead to a much better motherhood and childhood experience. They matter, and we need them. But whether women want kids at all, just one kid or more than one kid, is a totally different matter altogether.

I actually had several other theories first, but Finnish women debunked them. “No, that’s not it”. Then, as I kept asking more questions and had more conversations, a new theory emerged. I asked Finnish women on my Instagram if it rang true to them, and several women replied “precisely”:

“Do you think part of the reason for this low birth rate is that in Finland, women can really have it all and now want even more of that?

In Finland, you can balance both a career and children, without sacrificing one or the other. You can have your own time, your hobbies, and time with your partner. You can choose how you spend your resources. And now, Finnish women want even more of that.

They want to choose what their lives look like, and how they use their time and their resources—and this might not include more than one child, and for some it might not include children. No matter how much Finnish dads share the load or how equal the society is, it’s still the moms who have to carry the bigger load: they carry the child. Having children is a lot of work and it’s an intense responsibility, and there’s no way around it.

When you have kids, you also say no to a lot of other things. You have to. Unless you somehow completely outsource parenting, which in Finland is not a thing.

Spending two decades spearheading a bigger family might not be what many Finnish women want now. And it’s their right to have that choice.

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How do we feel about the fact that it is not individual women’s responsibility to keep the birth rate up? And that no matter how much some of us might say “it’s worth it!!” everyone can choose for themselves.

One study suggests that the reason for the low birth rate is that Finnish women start having kids later, and don’t have as many kids as they wished for. But there’s no solution to that either: if these women did not want that responsibility at a younger age—or to feel the general exhaustion of motherhood when they were educating themselves, building their career, and taking advantage of new opportunities (or using extra income on things they wanted to do, like travel)—you can’t advocate for them to choose that exhaustion or to say, “just go ahead! You can push for all your goals and dreams with babies, too” because we all know what day to day is like with young kids.

My last part of this unhinged birth rate theory is that we are focusing on the wrong sex. After listening to countless Finnish women’s dating stories (both younger women and those looking for a new relationship after divorce or separation—and who are open to more kids), I think we have had the whole conversation backwards.

The rest of this theory is for the Scandi Circle, the paid subscribers, partly because I want to have this conversation somewhere a little more protected than the open internet. Join in. It also unlocks the 100 Ways to Do Nothing summer guide, the whole Scandi Library too, workshops with Nordic-inspired experts, and all the paid sections and how-tos for the next year:

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