Basil Jarrett | Want more babies? Make better boys

There is something mildly quixotic about a Third-World country suddenly raising an SOS for its women to start having more babies. It’s almost Orwellian, this call from Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton urging women to step up the baby-making while outlining a raft of measures that Government will be implementing to encourage them in this endeavour.

Last week, Minister Tufton put Jamaica’s fertility problem squarely on the national table. According to the Statistical Institute (STATIN), Jamaica’s fertility rate has fallen to about 1.3 children per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Government is therefore considering a National Fertility and Family Support Strategy involving a mix of subsidised nursery and daycare fees, universal pre-K, expanded parental leave, workplace nurseries, stronger maternal and neonatal care, and other measures aimed at making family formation easier and more affordable. The goal here is to mitigate the long-term socio-economic risks of a falling birthrate, including a shrinking workforce, rising dependency ratios and strained public finances.

All sensible, all necessary, all long overdue. But I think we may be missing a critical piece of this fertility puzzle.

WHERE THE BOYS AREN’T

Last year, I wrote several articles in these pages arguing that the root cause of Jamaica’s declining birth rate is the quality, or lack thereof, of the boys and men that we are producing. If half of the baby-making machinery is being left behind by educational and social systems, why are we surprised when the other half loses interest in the effort. Jamaica’s declining birth rate isn’t so much a result of Jamaican women suddenly deciding that they dislike children as it is about the fact that our men are increasingly viewed as not being babyfather material.

For years, Jamaica has rightly invested heavily in the empowerment of girls and women. More girls are completing school, entering university and moving into professional careers. That is progress worth celebrating. But, while half of the population has been climbing the staircase of success, the other half has been standing several floors below wondering where the ladder went.

THE GENDER GAP

The Ministry of Education itself has acknowledged that our boys are underperforming in literacy and numeracy, are more likely to disengage from school, and are disproportionately represented among high-school dropouts. In September last year, Education State Minister Rhoda Crawford described male underachievement as a “national development crisis”, openly asking whether schools need more hands-on, skills-based learning, gender-sensitive teaching strategies and stronger male role models.

The numbers are depressing. Last year, only 19.2 per cent of students achieved five or more subjects including maths and English, even after improvements in individual maths and English pass rates. But, behind the aggregate numbers sits a stubborn gender gap. Caribbean examination data have consistently shown females outperforming males, while Jamaican education officials and researchers have repeatedly pointed to boys’ higher disengagement, weaker academic outcomes, lack of male role models and an education model insufficiently adapted to how many boys learn.

Now, let’s connect that to our fertility problem.

GOOD MAN SHORT NOWADAYS

A woman in her late 20s or 30s with a degree, stable employment, ambition and some degree of financial independence is not merely asking herself whether she can afford Pampers. She is also asking, “with whom?” Does the prospective father have stable employment? Can he contribute financially? Is he emotionally mature enough to handle the demands of raising children? Does he actually want to parent? Will he disappear after six months? Is she gaining a partner or acquiring another dependant?

To my mind, and apparently to the minds of the women I’ve spoken to on the matter, those are the real questions.

I don’t want to go as far as to say that Jamaican women simply “cannot find good men”. Fertility is far more complicated than that. But one cannot discuss family formation while pretending the quality, stability and economic prospects of potential male partners are irrelevant.

In other words, you cannot spend decades allowing boys to detach from education, drift toward informal employment, become overrepresented in violence and incarceration, struggle with emotional development, and then arrive at age 30 wondering why women are hesitant to build households with them. That invoice eventually comes due. And that is the bill that I believe Minister Tufton is now trying to pay. Kudos to him for the courage in confronting the challenge and proposing a fix.

IT’S NOT THE ECONOMY

Already, I hear the naysayers pushing back, “it’s not the boys, it’s the economy stupid”. The most convenient explanation for declining fertility is the cost of living. Housing, daycare, food, Pampers. These things come part and parcel with babies, making Government’s proposed childcare subsidies, parental leave and workplace support useful interventions.

But economics alone cannot explain the phenomenon. Some of the richest societies on Earth are also struggling with low fertility rates. Across OECD countries, average fertility fell from 2.84 children per woman in 1970 to 1.59 by 2020, with almost all OECD countries now below replacement level. Their roads, salaries, hospitals and social safety nets are better than ours, yet they, too, cannot persuade enough people to have children.

Conversely, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the last time that Jamaica was outpacing the recommended replacement fertility rate, we were a much poorer country with smaller homes, fewer washing machines and far fewer cars. Yet, the average household had children sharing bedrooms with enough siblings to form a small football side. So, clearly, GDP per capita does not automatically produce babies.

SMARTER WOMEN

What changed was that women became better educated, more economically independent, and more capable of choosing whether, when, and, crucially, with whom they have children. That last part is the key. If the pool of economically and socially stable women expands while the equivalent pool of men fails to keep pace, family formation becomes harder, even if everybody theoretically still wants children.

That is why fixing our boys must become part of Jamaica’s fertility strategy. This means identifying learning difficulties earlier, expanding vocational and technical pathways without treating them as dumping grounds for “dunce pickney”, and getting more responsible men into schools, mentoring programmes, sports programmes and community organisations. We also need to do a better job of teaching boys emotional literacy, conflict resolution, fatherhood and relationships.

Of course, government subsidies can help. A workplace nursery is useful. Better maternity care is essential, and longer parental leave helps enormously. But none of those policies fully answers the question facing a woman who wants two children but looks around and concludes that motherhood may require her to become financier, caregiver, disciplinarian and household head all by herself.

If we genuinely want women to feel confident about having the children many still desire, maybe the smartest fertility policy we can implement has nothing to do with them at all.

Major Basil Jarrett is the director of communications at the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA) and crisis communications consultant. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Threads @IamBasilJarrett and linkedin.com/in/basiljarrett