Last Sunday, at a parish in Lima, after Mass, a small group of women were chatting amongst themselves. The topic wasn’t the homily or the Gospel reading, but two families that had particularly caught their attention: one with seven young children and another with four. “I don’t understand how they can have so many children,” one said; another nodded with a gesture somewhere between admiration and disbelief. For them, a family having seven children, or even four, was almost incomprehensible, something outside the realm of “normal.”

The scene is seemingly banal, but it reveals a profound change: in many cities around the world, a large family has become a rarity, almost an “extreme case” that provokes commentary. This strangeness is not accidental; it is linked to a global demographic transformation discussed by demographer Nicholas Eberstadt in his article  “The Age of Depopulation”  and in his interview with Peter Robinson: for the first time since the Black Death of the 14th century, humanity is entering an era of depopulation.

While some continue to insist that the planet’s problem is overpopulation, the data shows otherwise: historic declines in fertility rates in France, in Europe as a whole, in East Asian countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and a trend that is silently spreading across almost the entire globe. The challenge facing humanity is no longer how to manage explosive population growth, but how to live in an aging world with fewer children, and what that means for families and human relationships.

From the fear of overpopulation to the challenge of depopulation

Eberstadt notes that from the 14th century to the present day, the world’s population has increased roughly twentyfold. For centuries, the rule was simple: humans tended to have more children than died, resulting in gradual, even exponential, population growth. In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich, with his famous book  *The Population Bomb *, encapsulated the fear of an entire generation: the fear that the population would grow so large that the planet could no longer sustain it.

However, today we are facing the opposite phenomenon. Global health is at its best point in history, life expectancy has increased in almost every country, and yet birth rates are plummeting below the replacement level: 2.1 children per woman.

Eberstadt provides some particularly eloquent data:

In East Asia—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—average fertility is roughly 50% below replacement level. Overall, the region is approaching one child per woman over her lifetime, and in some places, it is already below that level. If nothing changes, each new generation will be, on average, almost half as large as the previous one.

In Europe, the situation is also critical. The European Union went from registering some 6.8 million births in 1964 to fewer than 3.7 million in 2023. Russia, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has had about 17 million more deaths than births. France, traditionally one of the European countries with the highest birth rates, had fewer births last year than in 1806, when Napoleon was still winning battles.

The phenomenon extends across Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East: countries like Iran and Türkiye have had below-replacement rates for years.

Only sub-Saharan Africa, and to some extent the United States, thanks also to immigration, are significant exceptions. But even in Africa, fertility rates are declining rapidly. Humanity, on almost every continent, is heading toward a scenario of depopulation, even though many continue to speak, almost out of ideological inertia, of “overpopulation.”

The “lost art” of large families and the weight of context

Let’s return to the scene in the Lima parish. What was incomprehensible to the women—one family with seven children, another with four—was perfectly normal just a few decades ago in many neighborhoods in Peru and around the world. What has changed?

Eberstadt suggests that we are facing something akin to a “lost art.” In the interview, he explains that when the everyday experience of large families disappears from a society, so too does the “practical wisdom” and culture that make living in them possible. It’s like Latin: while it was a living language, it was passed on; once it ceased to be spoken, preserving it required an extraordinary effort. Similarly, when almost no one has many children, the very idea of ​​a large family becomes strange, even impractical.

This is where René Girard’s intuition about social imitation (  mimesis ) comes into play. For Girard, desires don’t arise in a vacuum: we desire what others desire, we imitate the models before us. If those close to us—neighbors, friends, colleagues—consider having one or two children “normal,” that tacit norm prevails; if, on the other hand, one lives in a context where four or five children are common, that will be the standard.

Eberstadt cites the case of Israel: even secular Jews in Israel have fertility rates well above replacement level, while secular Jews in the United States are far below. In Israel, a father with five children says that his neighbors have six or seven, and that many women comment among themselves, “Four is the new two.” In other words, the “cultural norm” of the environment supports the desire and the decision to have more children.

In the Lima parish where the anecdote is set, the opposite is true: the urban, middle-class environment has normalized small families to the point that seven children are seen almost as an incomprehensible excess. The art of living in a large family has been lost, or is being lost, and with it the symbolic language, the patience, and the virtues that sustain it.

What wealthy societies prioritize and the impact on birth rates

Why does this happen, especially in wealthy societies or among more educated sectors? Eberstadt echoes an idea already put forward by Gary Becker: when income and education levels increase, not only are more resources available, but tastes and priorities also change. In wealthy countries, he explains, people tend to value above all else:

a) Personal autonomy.

b) Individual self-realization.

c) Comfort and flexible management of one’s own time.

Children, with their many joys, are nevertheless the ultimate inconveniences: they demand time, sacrifices, renunciations of other personal projects, and their care extends over decades. Furthermore, in the middle and upper classes, having a child is often associated with a package of expectations: a good education, university, perhaps postgraduate studies, expensive educational experiences, and so on. Each child is an intensive project that seems incompatible with having many.

Eberstadt emphasizes that the best predictor of a country’s fertility rate is not so much its income level, but rather the number of children women say they want to have. And in many affluent societies, that number has plummeted. It’s not that biology has changed, but rather the prevailing notion of what constitutes a good life.

Here, too, a profound decline in values ​​is evident, not as a moralistic judgment, but as a shift in life’s orientation: we have moved from a life conceived in terms of gift, mission, belonging, transcendence, and family, to a life understood as an individual project of self-optimization, centered on the self. If the ideal is to always be available to oneself—to travel, change jobs, reinvent oneself—then children are perceived as a structural obstacle.

“Humanity is dying”

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has summed up the problem with a provocative phrase: “humanity is dying,” alluding to the global decline in birth rates. Eberstadt clarifies: from a material standpoint, humanity can decrease numerically for a long time and still have “billions” of people on the planet; moreover, our capacity for technological adaptation is enormous and makes it likely that living standards will continue to improve.

However, the central problem is not merely quantitative. Eberstadt underlines something unsettling: never before have so many people been alive at the same time as today, and rarely has there been so much loneliness. We have found formulas for material abundance, but not for the meaning of life. The “collapse” in birth rates reflects a reorganization of values ​​that, in many cases, replaces older, more demanding and fruitful values ​​with others that are more comfortable but ultimately empty.

In family and relational terms, depopulation implies:

a) Fewer siblings, cousins, uncles, grandparents surrounding the children.

b) Smaller and more fragile family networks.

c) Fewer everyday experiences of mutual care, sacrifice, and cooperation.

d) More elderly people without offspring or with only one child, more exposed to loneliness.

In a society of smaller and aging families, many human relationships become more fragile and contractual. The formative experience of growing up surrounded by others, with whom one learns to share, forgive, negotiate, support, and serve, is disrupted.

Seen in this light, the phrase “humanity is dying” also has a spiritual dimension: the sources of meaning and connection that have made the transmission of life and culture possible are weakening. The ladies of the parish are not only puzzled by a number—seven children—but by a way of life they no longer understand.

Conclusions

The scene in a Lima parish and the data from Eberstadt point in the same direction: in much of the world, we are not facing an uncontrollable population explosion, but rather a real depopulation that is advancing silently. In Europe, in East Asia, and in many middle-income countries, fertility rates are well below what is needed for generational replacement. Large families are becoming the exception, and this exception is perceived as something strange.

The cause is not only economic or biological. It is, above all, cultural and spiritual. By dint of imitating lifestyles centered on autonomy, self-realization, and comfort—what René Girard would explain as the logic of social imitation—many societies have ceased to see children as a desirable asset and have become incapable of sustaining the “art” of large families. The chain of transmission of a way of life that involved sacrifice, but also a human and emotional richness difficult to replace, has been broken.

Historical experience suggests that public policies offering economic incentives—such as birth bonuses and tax breaks—are insufficient to reverse this trend: they are expensive and generate only small, temporary improvements. The problem runs deeper: it has to do with what we understand by a fulfilling life.

If humanity wants to face the challenge of depopulation without losing its humanity, it needs more than technical adjustments. It needs a resurgence of meaning in life and values: a return to the idea that life is not exhausted by one’s own individual project, that  loving and being loved requires stepping outside of oneself , that the family is a place of growth and fulfillment, not just a burden.

When a culture rediscovers that life is a gift, one that deserves to be shared, children cease to be a problem to be managed and become once again a concrete answer to hope. Only within this framework—not just economic, but also one of meaning—can an openness to having more children and a richer family life be reborn, even if demographic figures do not return to past levels.

Perhaps, in a few years, in that same parish in Lima, it won’t be so strange to see a family with seven children or with four. Not because a message of “having many children” will be imposed again from the outside, but because the horizon of values ​​and desires will have slowly changed, making impossible, or incomprehensible, what for centuries was a normal expression of a life lived with confidence and openness to the future.