Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR's series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.
At an indoor play center in Cheyenne, Wyo., a sea of toddlers throw around colorful blocks and balls. Grace Moreno, who is 21, is there with her 11-month-old son, who is dressed in pajamas with little firetrucks on them.
"It's the only free place, so it's worth it," she said.
Finances are tight for Moreno and her husband. They moved to Wyoming from Texas, while pregnant, so her husband could work a higher-paying electrician job. But now that they are parents, paychecks seem to disappear.
"Our rent in Texas was like $800," Moreno said. "Here, it's like $1,775."
Rent is their biggest cost. They spend $300 a week on groceries and $100 on formula. The couple also have car payments, and they're paying bills for their son's delivery.
"I remember sitting there looking at a stack of mail, probably like maybe 3 inches tall … hospital bills, ER bills," Moreno recalled. "And I looked at my husband. I was like, 'I don't ever want to do this again.'"
Just too expensive to have kids
Months earlier, she thought she'd have multiple kids. But just six weeks after giving birth, Moreno decided to have her tubes tied.
"I was kind of like, 'Oh my gosh, my mom was right. This is too expensive.'"
Having only one kid means Moreno's family can save a couple of hundred dollars a month for a mortgage, so their son can someday have a backyard.
"Not only are homes more expensive, but then add, you know, a 7% [mortgage interest] rate on top of that," said Emily Harris, senior demographer at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah.
She said the rate at which women are having babies in Wyoming is just above the national average but still too low to replace the state's population. The same is true for all other states in the Mountain West, which have seen some of the largest drops in fertility rates nationwide in the past two decades.
Meanwhile, the region's population is still growing. A lot of people are moving here to escape bigger cities and for an outdoor lifestyle, which is driving up home costs.
Harris said things like child care costs and generational values also play into people's childbearing decisions and that they're definitely changing.
"We have this idea of, like, the nuclear family," Harris said. "You need to get married, and then you buy a home and then you have children … and really over the last decade or two, that kind of timeline has been halted and kind of rearranged."
Some states are passing laws aimed at easing housing costs for young families. But not Wyoming.
"The biggest barrier to addressing this housing crisis is really convincing my colleagues that the government has a role to play," said state Rep. Trey Sherwood, a member of the Democratic minority.
Progressives have pushed for a state fund to help build more affordable housing. But members of the Republican supermajority, like Sen. Bob Ide, say the government should stay out of it.
"Fiddling with housing, you know, it gums up the wheels of the free market," Ide said.
He pointed to laws the Wyoming Legislature passed to restrict abortion access, allow nannies to care for more children and ease property taxes as examples of family-friendly policies.
But Wyoming couples like Reesie Lane and Sean Thornton say it's still just too expensive to have kids now.
"Sean and I started dating and he said, 'I don't know, I think I want to have like six or seven kids,'" Lane said, as Thornton laughed.
"[But] as we went through more and more financial struggles I guess, eventually it came to like, 'Yeah, I think we can have like one or two,'" she added.
Lane and Thornton both work in the state university system. They spent their 20s struggling to pay rent in tiny apartments, and then around age 30, they finally bought a house.
"I think that's when we started to realize it might be too late," said Lane, who also has an ovarian syndrome that makes it hard to conceive. " I'm not sure that we're going to be able to have children."
Lane said it's heartbreaking to not have enough money to give even one kid a full life, but that it's also freeing.
For now, they're content with their fur babies, a Pomeranian and a shih tzu mix that were dressed in matching bandanas with fall leaves.
"They're a hundred percent little babies," Lane said, holding up the well-dressed pups, Huckleberry and Finn. "They're so spoiled."
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