In this interview, population researcher Venla Kettunen explains that the world is facing a new demographic crisis: a rapid decline in birth rates leading to too few children. She outlines how UN projections anticipate a sharp global population decrease as the working‑age cohort (20‑65) shrinks while the elderly population swells, threatening economic stability and increasing loneliness among seniors. Kettunen identifies several intertwined drivers of fertility decline: cultural shifts that prolong youth and delay partnership formation, biological limits of female fertility, a global drop in male sperm quality likely linked to chemical exposures, deteriorating relationship stability (potentially exacerbated by pervasive smartphone use), and climate‑change anxieties that are sometimes framed as altruistic child‑free choices. She argues that financial concerns are not the primary cause. Kettunen proposes policy actions, chiefly integrating fertility awareness and family‑planning education into health/sex curricula, and cautions that governments avoid messaging that feels coercive. On an individual level, she urges creating a more child‑friendly culture, offering informal community support, and openly celebrating the joy and wonder of having children. The conversation blends demographic data, sociocultural analysis, and practical recommendations to address the emerging underpopulation problem.
Chapters
Okay, so Venlak, can you first tell me the problem that we are dealing with right now?
So we're currently having too few children. 1 in 5 children who are wanted are never being born. So, and then if you want to put this on a more of a national level, then it's a problem because our society is diminishing at a pace that's too fast.
Noticing the obvious. Noticing the obvious.
Why is it that most people wrongly believe that the world is overpopulated?
Well, I think many of us have heard this for the past 20, 30 years, that this is the main problem of humanity, that there's too many of us. And it was true. It's changed really rapidly, very— and much more rapidly than anyone ever thought. So this is a sort of a new thing that now we're facing, this global crisis of too few children, which wasn't here before. So if you're not a population researcher, you don't follow birth rates that much, so it's not common knowledge that people have. So yeah.
What does that mean if it continues along this
trend? So the current UN forecasts are that the population size, global population size, will start to decrease quite rapidly and really rapidly. So it's like it's gone up and then it's going to come down like really, like it's quite dramatic. The economy is based on working age population paying for everything else. So working age population from Around 20 to 65 are the ones who sort of produce more than they consume, and this extra production then goes to people under 20 and then people over 65. And now we're going to have very small amounts of people within the age limit of 20 to 65 and very large amounts of people people over 65. So this is going to cause huge problems to the economies. But I'm not an economist, so my concern is mostly what it does to our social structures. And we're going to have way less relatives. So we are not only having less children, but we're having less Uncles and aunts, and we're having less grandchildren, we're having less cousins. So we are— the sort of building material for human societies is changing and diminishing. And we're going to see Very large amounts of lonely old elderly people, and we know that loneliness is actually worse for your health than alcohol or tobacco.
What is the reason if people want kids, and then why, what is the reason they're not having kids?
Back in, you know, previously people would choose their career and their sort of what they're going to study and what they're going to become when they grew up very, um, a lot earlier. So this, this sort of undecided, um, phase of life where you just are contemplating on what you'll become and what you want and who's the— who's going to be your sort of permanent partner for a longer time, the— all these things are more are being delayed. So there's this, in research literature, there's this sort of idea that the culture has changed so that people are sort of being young for a longer period. And then when we know that female reproductive age or female fertility is Very limited, so it stops at a certain age. So at 40, it usually like stops completely.
A lot of the common reasons that I've seen people give for not wanting kids is, I can't afford, I can't afford to have kids. How much, how much do you think that's a factor?
Partly, it seems that it's not the sort of the driving reason behind this fertility fall. We did this study where we interviewed young, like 20 to 30-year-olds without kids about family life, and the sort of things they said that one should have before everything is settled and you can have kids, the list was like Huge. Huge. And it was so long and so specific that if you put all those steps before having children, then you might end up never reaching all those steps, and then you— then it's too late. And the other thing is that, of course, climate change is a huge problem that we need to very— we need to tackle very fast. as a species, but we want this to be, you know, a healthy and good place for future humans as well, as well as other species. And then the third thing is that some people say that they don't want to have children because of climate change. They might be worried about the future of their children. Because of climate change. because of it. And there's also this sort of talk about an altruistic choice, that you choose not to have children. Doing something good. Doing something good by not having children. But it's not, I mean, I think it's very rarely the driving cause, the thought behind anyone's choice to not have children. So it might be a good explanation once you already have a bunch of other reasons not to have children, and then you sort explain it by this altruistic motive as well. But I think there's very few of us— like, we are the product of people who have evolved in the past. Our genes want to reproduce. So I don't think there's very many people who actually can sort of cancel that very innate biological need, instinct, by just being altruistic. So I find that implausible.
Yeah. So the end result is birth rates are declining, but you mentioned fertility is dropping. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like, so biologically, Are we— is there something happening in our bodies that's reducing fertility?
So we do know that male sperm quality has reduced, like has tremendously dropped during the last 20 years or so.
And is this globally or—
It's global. was first noticed and it first sort of started, it started from Denmark and Finland has followed. So currently, for example, of the men who want to donate sperm, only half of those samples that they give are good enough for a donation. Wow. So the hypothesis is that we have the chemicals that we are sort of exposing ourselves to all the time are the main sort of causal reason behind that. There's also, I guess, there's also some research on female egg quality and that that also is being compromised by the chemicals that we are exposed to. But the main reason that the sort of we have more fertility problem is that people start having children too late. So they start thinking about having children only when female fertility has naturally gone down, because it goes down with age. So female fertility is like female fecundity. The biology. The biological ability to become pregnant is highest from 20 to 24-year-olds, and then it sort of starts gradually going down. The first unions that people form, so the first cohabitational unions that they form, happen almost as young as they did before. So people form their first relationship Around the same time as they did before.
What is that age?
That's around 20, from 20 to 25-year-olds.
So first serious relationship?
Yeah, first serious relationship where you actually move in with a partner. So that hasn't changed that much. But what has changed, in previous generations it was more likely that within this first union there was a first child being born, then that it would have ended up in divorce or separation. And now it's the other way around. So these first unions are more likely to dissolve.
So they're breaking up before they have kids?
They're breaking up before they have kids. There's this hypothesis, because this whole sort of global decline in birth rates has happened Post-2010s, and nothing else has changed globally except for smartphones.
I love that.
But the phenomenon is so new that it's— there's no proper research on it yet. We know that using smartphones phones within the presence of your partner actually makes your couple relationship worse. We carry like potential new partners in our pockets.
So let me ask you, you've been working with the government or urging the government. What, from a governmental level, what are the Basic things that governments can do right now, or the Finnish government in particular, let's say.
Well, first of all, they should include this fertility awareness and planning a family type of things in in basic education. So this should be included in it's called terveys tieto in Finnish. So health education, which also includes sexual education. So So this whole sort of fertility— It seems obvious. It seems obvious, but it's not there. I mean, it's not in any— I mean, there's many countries that have discussed this. There's Australia, there's Denmark, there's Sweden, there's Finland, and in none of those countries it's actually part of the sexual education curriculum.
What's the
reason? At least one of the things is that people are very afraid of telling anyone to have children. This is a message that the government doesn't want to give, so it's not— so there's this danger that when you talk about fertility or having children that you're imposing or you're sort of saying people that you should have children, but this is not the case. It's just that you take control of your own sort of family plans, and it's okay to say that I don't want children, but it's not okay to not think about it. So this is what we need. So we have very good sexual education when it comes to preventing unwanted pregnancies, which is of course super, super important, but then when it comes to telling people what to do if they want to have children, that's almost completely absent from the curriculum.
What can we do as individuals?
So on an individual level, I think we can do quite many things. So one is that we need to welcome children and we need to help each other. So we need to create a more positive atmosphere towards children, at least in Finland. I think the culture is Somewhat sort of anti-childish. We should also offer each other help because raising children is quite a bit of work and many people are doing it quite alone these days and this is very new in the history of human beings. So we tend to raise our children in communities and in groups Because it is demanding. And nowadays people usually very often live quite far away from their kin or relatives. Yeah. So we need informal support. The other thing is that in Finland, at least, I think many people are very afraid of talking how lovely it is to have children. This is making me emotional. I have 2. They're lovely. They bring me joy every day, and I cannot imagine my life without them. So it's this joy and happiness and fulfillment that children bring that we rarely say.
Celebrate.
Celebrate. We often talk about the difficult things, you know, you're sleep deprived and tired and always in a hurry, but those are so irrelevant compared to the wonder of creating a new life that female bodies do and the wonder of giving birth. It can Sometimes it's traumatic and very difficult, but many times it's not. Many times it's actually a very beautiful moment in a woman's life to give birth to a new life. It's miraculous.
