Commentary by Ala Pomelile
Our fertility rate has fallen to 1.53 children per woman (Stats NZ, year ended March 2026), and while official median projections stabilise near 1.55, lower scenarios and international trends leave open the possibility of further decline toward 1.2 or 1.3 in the coming decades. The replacement rate required simply to maintain a stable population is 2.1. We are nowhere near it and have not been for some time.
This goes beyond observations about our demography; it serves as a warning. When we see fewer people deciding to have children, it is worth considering not only the challenges they face but also what this says about the broader culture and society in which these choices are made.
For years, New Zealand’s political class largely avoided that conversation. Recent initiatives such as New Zealand First’s Kiwi Kids Grant and National’s extension of parental leave have made children and families a national conversation. Yet while the debate often focuses on how to raise the birth rate, a more important question lies beneath it: why has the desire to have children weakened in the first place?
Our birth-rate decline has not happened overnight, nor in isolation. It has unfolded alongside another long-term social transformation: the decline of marriage.
In 1971, New Zealand’s marriage rate stood at 45.5 marriages per thousand eligible people. Today it is less than a fifth of that level—around 7.6 in 2025. Fewer people marry, those who do marry tend to do so later, and many never marry at all. Around half of New Zealand children are now born outside marriage. Many of those births occur within cohabiting relationships rather than to truly single mothers, yet the broader retreat from formal, enduring commitment still correlates with lower completed fertility.
The relationship between marriage and fertility is complex and multi-causal. Factors such as delayed partnership, housing costs, and education and career patterns all interact with the retreat from traditional marriage. Throw into the mix increased women’s participation in education and the labour force, greater access to contraception, the normalisation of childlessness, and a greater emphasis on individual fulfilment, career, leisure, and personal autonomy.
However, the broader historical pattern is hard to ignore. Throughout human history, marriage has served as the primary institution through which societies formed families and raised children. As marriage has weakened, so too has family formation. When a culture increasingly treats marriage as optional, temporary or merely symbolic, we should not be shocked when fewer children follow.
Recent research gives us even clearer insight into this connection. When we look closely at fertility declines in the United States and Australia, it becomes clear that a significant part—about three-quarters in the U.S. since 2007—is due to fewer people being married. Interestingly, fertility rates among those who are married haven’t changed much; what’s really shifted is the number of people getting married and staying married. Studies over time show that the chance of having a first child jumps considerably after marriage, and longer, earlier, and more stable marriages tend to lead to higher overall fertility. While cohabitation is common, it hasn’t fully replaced marriage—couples who remain unmarried after their first child generally have fewer children later on, and unstable or serial partnerships tend to lower fertility rather than increase it.
Policy experiments show similar trends. When changes make divorce simpler or lessen the benefits of formal marriage, we see fewer marriages and lower fertility rates. On the other hand, positive wealth surprises that make entering into partnerships easier tend to boost both marriage and childbearing, at least for a while. The relationship goes both ways: wanting children can encourage marriage, just like marriage can help with having children, but the evidence clearly indicates that pulling back from committed partnerships generally leads to fewer births.
Decades of research, including meta-analyses, consistently show that children tend to thrive most, on average, when they are raised by their married biological mother and father. While children in other family arrangements can do well too, studies on family stability continue to point in the same direction, even after accounting for various factors. The impacts of family breakdown are not just felt by individuals—they often affect children, communities, and taxpayers as well.
This is why renewed political interest in supporting families matters. For the first time in many years, there appears to be a willingness to say openly that children and families are national priorities worthy of public attention and investment. Yet there remains a danger in assuming that financial incentives alone can reverse demographic decline.
International evidence suggests otherwise. Australia’s baby bonus, Quebec’s birth grants, Sweden’s generous family benefits and Hungary’s family policies all provided support to parents. In many cases they influenced the timing of births, encouraging families to have children slightly earlier, but had only limited effects on the total number of children born over a lifetime. Some recent evaluations of Australia’s baby bonus found modest increases in completed fertility, though at high fiscal cost per extra birth. Fertility decline is not primarily a financial problem. If it were, some of the world’s wealthiest societies would be enjoying baby booms rather than birth droughts. Money can help families already inclined to have children. What it cannot do is create the desire for family life where that desire has faded.
A serious pro-family policy framework would therefore go beyond grants and subsidies. It would include measures such as income splitting that acknowledge the contribution of parents raising children on a single income. It would ensure that policy is at least neutral towards couple formation rather than creating unintended disincentives to partnership. It would also address practical barriers that delay family life, especially housing. Affordable housing matters not only because people need somewhere to live, but also because high costs delay the age at which young couples feel able to marry and start families. The later family formation is postponed, the fewer children many couples ultimately have.
Most importantly, it would support the institutions that strengthen family life. Churches, communities and local organisations often understand the needs of families far better than distant bureaucracies. These institutions help build the social capital upon which healthy family formation depends.
The hard truth is that no policy can change a culture that does not value children. Governments can remove barriers to family life and provide practical support to parents, but they cannot create the desire to marry, raise children and invest in future generations. Those decisions arise from deeper convictions about what makes life meaningful and what obligations we owe to one another, including to those not yet born.
The countries struggling most with low fertility are not necessarily those that spend the least on families. More often, they are societies where the language of individual fulfilment has gradually displaced the language of duty, sacrifice and responsibility. Children require commitment and a willingness to place another person’s needs ahead of one’s own. These virtues have shaped many nations in the West, and they remain among the foundations on which strong families and flourishing societies are built.
It is heartening to see politicians recognise the importance of marriage, family and children. Fixing our birthrate crisis will require more than government programmes. It also depends on families, churches, communities and civic institutions having the confidence to both live out and promote the values that make family formation possible.
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke described society as a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” That insight remains relevant today. We inherit institutions, freedoms and cultural traditions we did not create, and we hold and steward them in trust for those who come after us.
The question facing New Zealand is not simply how to raise the birth rate. It’s also about whether we still have the confidence to nurture families, invest in future generations and pass on what we have inherited. A society’s future ultimately depends not only on what it chooses to fund, but also on what it values and believes is worth preserving.
