The past decade brought many things to Oregon: economic recovery from the Great Recession, surging household incomes and some of the nation’s biggest population gains.
What it did not deliver: more children.
Even as Oregon added more than 400,000 adults from 2010 to 2020, resulting in an overall population spike of 10.6%, the number of children remained virtually unchanged.
In fact, Oregon reported only 151 more children age 17 or younger last year than it did a decade earlier, according to an analysis by The Oregonian of 10-year Census data.
“It’s pretty interesting. Probably something that people don’t expect,” said Charles Rynerson, a Portland State University researcher studying population trends. “However, it was entirely predictable.”
Oregon is one of 30 states nationally that recorded no growth, or even declines, in its number of children over the past decade, while other states — including Washington — posted gains in their respective kids counts.
Oregon’s population is aging, a slow-motion phenomenon that could have major ramifications for the economy and society at large. Oregon’s youth population grew by about 20,000 between 2000 and 2010, but the falloff has been pronounced since around the Great Recession, as more women choose to delay childbirth, teen pregnancies fall and some potential parents decide to have fewer or no children at all.
What’s less predictable is whether the trend will hold — and what happens if it does. As has long been known, as the baby boomers age, they will need services provided by young, working-aged people. With fewer children today to grow into adults by the time that happens, there could be an imbalance.
Of 4.2 million Oregonians, 866,604 — or 20.5% — are children. A decade ago, it was 22.6%.
“If these trends hold, Oregon will be an older, grayer state,” said University of Oregon economics professor Tim Duy. “And the economy will reflect that.”
Declining births
While the downward trend in births has been apparent for some time, why it’s happening is not so clear.
“That’s a less straightforward question,” Rynerson said.
It’s among questions that Alison Gemmill of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has dedicated her career to — trying to figure out why fewer women are having children and whether they’ll have kids later or never at all.
Since 2005, Oregon saw the 7th-largest drop in birth rates of any state, federal data show. And at the current average number of children per woman, there aren’t enough babies to replace the population. Now, women in Oregon are expected to have, on average, 1.4 children. They must have at least 2.1, on average, to replace themselves and the father.
Gemmill listed an assortment of factors potentially contributing to the decline in birth rates nationally and in Oregon over the last 10 years.
One contributor is a dramatic fall in teen pregnancies. Birth rates among Oregon girls and women ages 15 to 19 dropped nearly two-thirds from 2005 to 2019 — the ninth-largest relative drop of any state. Births are down for women 20 to 24, too, accounting for about 17% of all births last year, compared to 22% of all births a decade ago.
Another possible explanation for the fall in births among teens and adults, Gemmill said, is the widespread use of contraceptives in the state. Oregon is first in the nation in contraceptive use among women at risk of pregnancy, with 8 in 10 sexually active women under 50 using some form of contraception, federal data show.
Gemmill said there have also been less easily measured changes in society. There’s more of a sense of despair about the future of the world among young people, she said, along with more financial barriers to raising kids.
“Things are just getting worse,” Gemmill said.
Then, she said, there is less of a stigma around not having children. “It’s now acceptable for people to say they don’t want kids,” Gemmill said.
But the million-dollar question for Gemmill is whether the drop in births is permanent. The fact that women are having fewer kids doesn’t mean they won’t have kids at all. The experience in Europe, which has demographic patterns a few decades ahead of those in the United States, indicates there could be a rebound, Gemmill said.
But it could be decades before it’s clear if that happens. In the meantime, Oregon will continue to rely on people migrating into the state to increase its population and workforce.
Migration
If it weren’t for people moving to the state, Oregon’s economy would be in a tough spot.
“In the long-run, without migration, Oregon’s population will decline,” said Kanhaiya Vaidya, a demographer with the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis who forecasts population trends for the state.
The declining birth rate has outpaced Vaidya’s past forecasts. Five years ago, Vaidya said by 2040 more people would die than are born in Oregon. Before the pandemic, he revised his forecasts to say it would happen by around 2027 or 2028.
Vaidya said he isn’t particularly worried about the declining birth rates in Oregon.
In a worst-case scenario, there could be an imbalance in the economy, with a lot of elderly Oregonians needing services that the workforce simply cannot meet. For that to happen, there would have to be an economic downturn long enough to reverse the trend of working-age people moving to Oregon, Vaidya said.
Duy, the University of Oregon economics professor, said that, indeed, with current trends, there could be greater constraints on economic growth and smaller labor force growth in the future. If it’s hard to find workers, then companies will either increase their productivity per employee or look for alternatives to Oregon, he said.
Interestingly, migration among working adults appears to have put Washington way ahead of Oregon in its child population — and perhaps could serve as a roadmap for growing the kid count.
Washington began 2010 with about 67,500 more children than a decade earlier, and it began 2020 with nearly 100,000 more children than the decade before.
There’s a straightforward explanation, said University of Washington demography professor Sara Curran.
In essence, tech companies — Seattle-based Amazon, in particular — have over the last two decades gone on a hiring frenzy, drawing thousands of people a month, at times.
Usually hiring younger people who are nimble and able to move states, those people are now older and having children.
“That cohort is settling down,” Curran said, “and reproducing.”
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