Not enough children?

By Herman M. Lagon

There was a time when you could tell a local home was alive even before you stepped inside. You would hear the kids first—running, shouting, laughing over each other. Slippers by the door never stayed in pairs. Meals were a bit tight, a bit noisy, but no one minded. These days, that kind of scene feels less usual. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) says the fertility rate is down to 1.7%, but even without the number, you can sense it. Fewer kids. Quieter homes. Lower kinder enrollment. Not dramatically, not all at once—but steadily, almost quietly, as if the change itself does not want attention.

You hear the reasons in passing. A young teacher says she will wait—life is expensive. A couple counts costs before even considering a child. Another says it as it is: they do want children—just not yet. And that alone says a lot. Having a child today is no longer something you rush into. It is something you sit with first.

Part of this shift is actually encouraging. More women are finishing school, making their own choices, and accessing family planning. The survey reflects that—more use of contraception, more women deciding when to stop. That is not just decline. It is agency. And when people have that, families tend to be healthier (UNFPA, 2023).

But the picture is not even. The numbers reveal a quiet divide. Women with less schooling still tend to have more children, while those with higher education have fewer. The same goes for income. Those with fewer resources often end up with larger families—not always by choice, but by circumstance. Meanwhile, those who can afford children are the ones choosing fewer. It is a pattern that feels uncomfortable to say out loud, but it is there.

At some point, the 2006 Idiocracy movie stops feeling like pure comedy. The idea was simple: those who plan carefully delay having children, while others do not—and over time, that gap grows. It is exaggerated, yes, but it raises a quiet concern. What happens when those who have the most options decide not to have children? We are not there as a country, but there are small signs that make you pause and think.

There is a strange irony here. The stories we watched growing up warned about the opposite. Thanos, in Avengers, believed there were simply too many—too many lives across the universe. Dan Brown’s Inferno imagined overpopulation as the real threat. It is a different kind of concern now. Not too many children, but maybe too few in the years ahead. It is not loud, but it is there.

If you think about it, it makes sense that this comes up during Holy Week. There is a kind of quiet built into these days—a pause that lets things surface. Questions about life, about sacrifice, about what really matters. And in that pause, decisions about family stop feeling abstract. They begin to feel weightier, closer to home, almost something you handle with care.

And when you step back from that reflection, you begin to notice something else. When fertility drops, the effects come in slowly. You do not notice it at first. Then you start to see it—like in South Korea, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Hongkong, Japan, Spain, and Italy where there are fewer workers and more elderly to care for. Our country is still young, but that will not last forever.

Still, smaller families can also mean better chances for each child. Many parents today are not avoiding children—they are just trying to raise them right. As one teacher said after class, “It is not that we do not want children. We just do not want them to struggle the way we did.” That line stays with you longer than expected.

Because it shifts the question. It is not really about how many children people have, but what kind of life they are working with. In some places, families grow because options are limited—schooling, healthcare, even basic support. In cities, it is different. Everything feels expensive, uncertain, a bit fragile. So people wait. Same country, but very different reasons behind the same pattern. In that sense, fertility is less about preference and more about conditions. The Commission on Population and Development (CPD; formerly PopCom) has long pushed for responsible parenthood—not as a slogan, but as a balance between choice and capacity. That remains the more useful lens.

For teachers, this shift is already visible. Some classrooms are shrinking, others remain crowded. Students now often come from smaller families, carrying bigger expectations. At the same time, there are students who come from homes where things are tight. You see it in class—the country in one room, uneven and real.

It is tempting to reduce this into a simple debate: more children versus fewer. But that misses the point. The question is not about pushing people to have more or less. It is about whether Filipinos are able to choose freely—and raise children without feeling overwhelmed by the cost of it.

What is happening now is not a crisis in the loud sense. It is a quiet adjustment. Filipinos are thinking harder about family, about timing, about readiness. Some will wait. Some will stop at one. Some will opt out. These are personal decisions, but together, they are shaping something bigger.

A falling fertility rate is not just about numbers. It is about how people see their future. And right now, many Filipinos are choosing carefully—not out of fear, but out of a kind of realism that says: if we bring a child into this world, we want to do it right.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.