My maternal grandmother had two daughters. In 2026, this number sounds even high, given that the country’s rate is around 1.55, according to data from . The point is that my grandmother gave birth in the 1940s of the last century, when the fertility rate was much higher, with more than six births per . What leads women not to have children or to decide to have one or more children?
The explanations are diverse and vary between countries. In the article “Understanding Latin America’s Fertility Decline: Age, Education and Cohort Dynamics”, written by Milagros Onofri, Inés Berniell, Raquel Fernández and Azul Menduiña, the authors argue that the traditional discussion — associated with Economics — about the dilemma between having more children or investing more in the education and development of each one (quantity x quality) may have lost ground to the more recent perspective of , also a winner of the award.
The conflict between career and family, the search for more ambitious work and longer working hours, in addition to women’s burden of care, help explain the drop in fertility over the last six decades.
In the article, the authors analyze the drop in the fertility rate in several countries, including Brazil. One piece of evidence is the reduction in births among younger cohorts, such as teenagers and women up to 24 years old. According to IBGE, in 2022, the average age at which Brazilian women have children was 28.1 years.
According to harmonized data from the World Population Perspectives, used by the authors, between 2000 and 2022, the reduction in children among women under 30 explains most of the drop in the fertility rate in Brazil, with the group aged 20 to 24 contributing the most, responsible for 39% of the total reduction in this period, followed by 28% attributed to teenage mothers between 15 and 19 years old. The same pattern is observed in several Latin American countries analyzed in the study.
Age composition, however, does not tell the whole story. The article also analyzes the relationship between the drop in the fertility rate and the level of education of mothers, using data from censuses or vital statistics. Brazil, due to the delay in access to microdata from the 2022 Census, which has not yet been released, is not included in the analysis.
Among the countries analyzed are , , , , , and . Only in Costa Rica is there an increase in births per 1,000 women with higher education. In all other countries and education levels, there is a drop in births per 1,000 women, especially among those with less education.
Finally, to try to understand the long-term behavioral effects, the authors use data from women with a complete fertility cycle, from cohorts born between the mid-1950s and 1970s.
The results show that successive cohorts of women in the region had, on average, fewer children. This means that the drop in fertility we observed is not limited to a postponement of births and suggests declines that persist among different cohorts.
In Brazil, women born in the mid-1950s had, on average, more than three children, while in the 1979–1983 generation, fewer than two. Therefore, understanding why women, in successive generations, are choosing to have fewer children is fundamental to thinking about care, of and of.
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