Regulations Are Keeping Families Smaller Than They Want to Be
American women are having fewer kids than they’d like. By one estimate, the average fertility gap—the distance between a woman’s ideal number of children and achieved fertility—for U.S. women is 0.76, close to one child. That figure, though, varies significantly between states: in North Dakota, the gap is one-third, while in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Alaska, it’s greater than one child.
These state-level differences help us investigate how state policy could be shaping family decisions. Affordable childcare options are key for young families, and regulations of childcare vary greatly by state. Using the fertility-gap metric and a novel Childcare Regulations Index, we set out in a recent working paper to understand just how pertinent childcare regulations are when it comes to the gap between ideal and achieved family size.
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