Peer Pressure Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on peer pressure.

Peer pressure can be both negative and positive. Because if a person is a peer pressuring you for a good cause then it is motivation. Motivation is essential for the growth of a person. While peer pressure for a bad cause will always lead you to a disastrous situation.

Peer Pressure Essay

Therefore it necessary for a person to not get influenced by the people around them. They should analyze the outcome of the deed in a strict manner. So that they no may commit anything harmful for themselves. As this world is full of bad people, so you need to be careful before trusting anybody.

Advantages of Peer Pressure

Peer pressure is advantageous in many ways. Most importantly it creates a sense of motivation in the person. Which further forces the person to cross the barrier and achieve something great. Furthermore, it boosts the confidence of a person. Because our brain considers people’s opinions and makes them a priority.

Many salesmen and Entrepreneurs use this technique to influence people to buy their products. Whenever we are in a social meet we always get various recommendations. Therefore when a person gets these recommendations the brain already starts liking it. Or it creates a better image of that thing. This forces the person to buy the product or at least consider it.

This peer pressure technique also works in creating a better character of a person. For instance, when we recommend someone for a particular job, the interviewer already gets a better image of that person. Because he is recommended by a person the interviewer trusts. Therefore there is a great chance of that person to get hired.

Above all the main advantage of peer pressure can be in youth. If a young person gets influenced by an individual or a group of people. He can achieve greater heights in his career.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Peer Pressure

There are various disadvantages of peer pressure which can harm a person in many ways. If any person is not willing to perform a task then the peer pressure can be frustrating to him.

Furthermore, peer pressure should not be in an excessive manner. Because it lands a negative impact on the person. A person should be of the mindset of listening to himself first. While considering opinions in favor of him.

Peer pressure in youth from a bad company can lead a person to a nasty situation. Furthermore, it can also hamper a student’s career and studies if not averted. Youth these days are much influenced by the glamorous life of celebrities.

And since they follow them so much, these people become their peers. Thus they do such things that they should not. Drugs and smoking are major examples of this. Moreover most shocking is that the minors are even doing these things. This can have adverse effects on their growth and career.

It is necessary to judge the outcome of a deed before getting influenced by peers. Furthermore, peer pressure should always be secondary. Your own thoughts and wants should always have the first priority.

Q1. What is peer pressure?

A1 . Peer pressure is the influence on people by their peers. As a result, people start following their opinions and lifestyle. Furthermore, it is considering a person or his opinion above all and giving him the priority.

Q2. Which sector of the society is the peer pressure adversely affecting?

A2 . Peer pressure has adverse effects on the youth of society. Some false influencers are playing with the minds of the youngsters. As a result, the youth is going in the wrong direction and ruining their career opportunities.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

tutor

  • Travelling Essay
  • Picnic Essay
  • Our Country Essay
  • My Parents Essay
  • Essay on Favourite Personality
  • Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
  • Essay on Knowledge is Power
  • Essay on Gurpurab
  • Essay on My Favourite Season
  • Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Google Play

peer pressure is beneficial essay

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

Leverage Edu

  • School Education /

Essay on Peer Pressure: 100, 200, and 450 Word Samples in English

' src=

  • Updated on  
  • Mar 2, 2024

Essay on Peer Pressure

Have you ever done something just because your friends or peers have done it? Say, watched a movie or TV series, visited places, consumed any substance, or academic achievement. This is a classic example of peer pressure. It means you are influenced by your peers or people around you.

Peer pressure can be both positive and negative, but mostly, it has negative effects. Peer pressure often occurs during adolescence or teenage years when individuals are more susceptible to the opinions and actions of their peers. Sometimes, peer pressure can lead to serious consequences. Therefore, we must deal with peer pressure in a civilized and positive way. 

On this page, we will provide you with some samples of how to write an essay on peer pressure. Here are essay on peer pressure in 100, 200 and 450 words.

This Blog Includes:

Essay on peer pressure in 450 words, essay on peer pressure in 200 words, essay on peer pressure in 100 words.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

‘Be true to who you are and proud of who you’re becoming. I have never met a critic who was doing better than me.’ – Jeff Moore

Why do we seek recognition? Why do we want to fit in? Why are we not accepting ourselves in just the way we are? The answer to these questions is almost the same; peer pressure. Peer pressure is the influence of our peers in such a way, that we wish and try to do things in the same way as others did. 

Negatives and Positive Peer Pressure

Peer pressure can have positive and negative effects. Positive peer pressure can result in better academic performance, personal growth and development, etc. We can be a source of inspiration to our friends or vice versa, which can result in better academic growth, adopting healthier lifestyles, and engaging in community service. For example, you are part of a group collaborating on a community project that demonstrates the constructive influence of peer interaction. This can encourage a sense of purpose and shared responsibility.

Negative Peer Pressure is the opposite of positive peer pressure. In such cases, we are influenced by the negative bad habits of our peers, which often result in disastrous consequences. Consider the scenario where one of your friends starts smoking simply to conform to the smoking habits of his peers, highlighting the potentially harmful consequences of succumbing to negative influences.

How to Deal With Peer Pressure?

Peer pressure can be dealt with in several ways. The first thing to do is to understand our own values and belief systems. Nobody wants to be controlled by others, and when we know what is important to us, it becomes easier to resist pressure that goes against our beliefs.

A person with self-esteem believes in his or her decisions. It creates a strong sense of self-worth and confidence. When you believe in yourself, you are more likely to make decisions based on your principles rather than succumbing to external influences.

Choosing your friends wisely can be another great way to avoid peer pressure. Positive peer influence can be a powerful tool against negative peer pressure.

Building the habit of saying ‘No’ and confidently facing pressure in uncomfortable situations can be a great way to resist peer pressure. So, it is important to assertively express your thoughts and feelings. 

Peer pressure can have different effects on our well-being. It can contribute to personal growth and development, and it can also negatively affect our mental and physical health. We can deal with peer pressure with the necessary skills, open communication, and a supportive environment. We must act and do things in responsible ways.

Also Read: Essay on Green Revolution in 100, 200 and 500 Words

‘A friend recently started smoking just because every guy in his class smokes, and when they hang out, he feels the pressure to conform and be accepted within the group. However, he is not aware of the potential health risks and personal consequences associated with the habit. 

This is one of the many negative examples of peer pressure. However, peer pressure can often take positive turns, resulting in better academic performance, and participation in social activities, and physical activities. 

Dealing with peer pressure requires a delicate balance and determination. Teenagers must have alternative positive options to resist negative influences. Developing a strong sense of self, understanding personal values, and building confidence are crucial components in navigating the challenges posed by peer pressure.

Learning to say ‘No’ assertively can be a great way to tackle peer pressure. You must understand your boundaries and be confident in your decisions. This way, you can resist pressure that contradicts your values. Also, having a plan in advance for potential pressure situations and seeking support from trusted friends or mentors can contribute to making informed and responsible choices.

‘It is our choice how we want to deal with peer pressure. We can make good and bad decisions, but in the end, we have to accept the fact that we were influenced by our peers and we were trying to fit in.’

‘Peer pressure refers to the influence of your peers. Peer pressure either be of positive or negative types. Positive peer pressure can encourage healthy habits like academic challenges, physical activities, or engaging in positive social activities. Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, can lead us to engage in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, reckless driving, or skipping school, to fit in with our peers.’

‘There are many ways in which we can deal with peer pressure. Everyone has their personal beliefs and values. Therefore, they must believe in themselves and should not let other things distract them. When we are confident in ourselves, it becomes easier to stand up for what we believe in and make our own choices. Peer pressure can be dealt with by staying positive about yourself.’

Ans: ‘Peer pressure refers to the influence of your peers. Peer pressure either be of positive or negative types. Positive peer pressure can encourage healthy habits like academic challenges,, physical activities, or engaging in positive social activities. Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, can lead us to engage in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, reckless driving, or skipping school, to fit in with our peers.’

Ans: Peer pressure refers to the influence of our peers or people around us. 

Ans: Peer pressure can have both positive and negative effects on school children. It can boost academic performance, encourage participation in social activities, adopt healthier lifestyles, etc. However, peer pressure often results in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, unsafe activities, or other harmful behaviours.

Related Articles

For more information on such interesting speech topics for your school, visit our speech writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

' src=

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Connect With Us

peer pressure is beneficial essay

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Resend OTP in

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

peer pressure is beneficial essay

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

peer pressure is beneficial essay

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

peer pressure is beneficial essay

Don't Miss Out

  • Skip to main content

India’s Largest Career Transformation Portal

Essay on Peer Pressure for Students in English [500+ Words]

January 2, 2021 by Sandeep

Essay on Peer Pressure: Building up of negative influences within young adolescent minds to excel among peers is called peer pressure. It can create disturbed mind patterns and lead a person to suicidal thoughts, stress and depression. The outcome of such behaviour can negatively alter a person’s behaviour. It may misguide him to consume alcohol and drugs and risk his own life. It may also lead to anti-social behaviours amongst teenagers pushing them into criminal activities.

Essay on Peer Pressure 500 Words in English

Below we have provided Peer Pressure Essay in English, suitable for class 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

It’s Better To Walk Alone Than With A Crowd Going In The Wrong Direction. – Diane Grant

Human beings are social animals. We all make a lot of relations in our life. In choosing some relationships, we do not have a choice, but for some others, we do. Making friends and hanging out with them at school and other places is fun but we need to choose our friends wisely. Suppose your friend calls you to the basement stairs of the school and asks you to share a cigarette with him. You deny it. But then he says that if you do not smoke, he will spread your secrets in the whole class. This is known as peer pressure.

It is getting someone to do something that they might not like to do or might not be comfortable doing. Peer pressure is not always bad. Sometimes, it even makes you want to put in more effort and reach your potential. Positive peer pressure is beneficial and healthy, but it is the negative side of it, that can prove to be harmful. School children and teenagers are more prone to peer pressure. This is the age where they indulge themselves in alcohol, smoking, drugs, ragging, beating up others, stealing and what not!

Hence, it becomes necessary first to identify when we are trying to be peer pressured. We should know how to recognise when someone is trying to make us a victim of this. Whenever you feel like this, remember to ask yourself some questions. Is this right what they are asking me to do? Does it feel wrong to me? Am I uncomfortable while doing this? Would I still do this if my parents or some adult were around? There are many ways in which your friends can pressurise you. They may blackmail, threaten or even bribe you. But you should know what is right for you and that saying “NO” has so much power.

Negative Effects of Peer Pressure

Peer pressure can harm us. It results in grades at school getting lowered, a disrespect towards our parents, teachers and other adults, resorting to violent or aggressive acts and bunking or skipping classes. It may even lead to us getting addicted to various harmful substances and becoming insensitive towards others and their feelings. Imagine that you are playing with your friends in the park and your parents have told you to be back home by 7:00 p.m. But as soon as you say to your friends that you are leaving, one of them forces you to come to his house to play video games.

He says that if you do not agree to go, then you and he are no longer friends. What do you do in such a situation? Do you give in and go to his house and disobey your parents? Or do you make him understand that you must be home today and maybe tomorrow you can come to his house after taking permission from your mom and dad? There are numerous ways to resist peer pressure, and we should not hesitate to take them. We can simply walk away and even warn others about the consequences of what they are doing. We can say no firmly and also call for an adult in situations we feel that require their help.

Positive Effects of Peer Pressure

On the opposite side, we have good or positive peer pressure which is beneficial for us. If your friends do social work or volunteering, it is apparent that you too would want to indulge in such an activity. Say suppose at the time of after school activities, your friends already in a school sports team encourage you to join in. This is positive peer pressure because on the field; you get to collaborate and work together as a team. Thus, spending your time productively. If you have friends who encourage you to study more when your marks dip, then you indeed have found good friends who look out for you.

  • Bipolar Disorder
  • Therapy Center
  • When To See a Therapist
  • Types of Therapy
  • Best Online Therapy
  • Best Couples Therapy
  • Best Family Therapy
  • Managing Stress
  • Sleep and Dreaming
  • Understanding Emotions
  • Self-Improvement
  • Healthy Relationships
  • Student Resources
  • Personality Types
  • Verywell Mind Insights
  • 2023 Verywell Mind 25
  • Mental Health in the Classroom
  • Editorial Process
  • Meet Our Review Board
  • Crisis Support

What Is Peer Pressure?

Types, Examples, and How to Deal With Peer Pressure

peer pressure is beneficial essay

David Young-Wolff/The Image Bank / Getty Images 

  • Parental Influence
  • Peer Pressure at All Ages
  • How to Cope

Peer pressure is the process by which members of the same social group influence other members to do things that they may be resistant to, or might not otherwise choose to do. Peers are people who are part of the same social group, so the term "peer pressure" refers to the influence that peers can have on each other.

Usually, the term peer pressure is used when people are talking about behaviors that are not considered socially acceptable or desirable, such as experimentation with alcohol or drugs.

Though peer pressure is not usually used to describe socially desirable behaviors, such as exercising or studying, peer pressure can have positive effects in some cases.

Types of Peer Pressure

In reality, peer pressure can be either a positive or negative influence that one peer, or group of peers, has on another person. The following six terms are often used to describe the types of peer pressure a person may experience.

Spoken vs. Unspoken Peer Pressure

As the name suggests, spoken peer pressure is when someone verbally influences another person to do something. For instance, a teenager might influence their friend to smoke a cigarette by saying, "Come on, one cigarette won't hurt."

Unspoken peer pressure, on the other hand, is when no one verbally tries to influence you. However, there is still a standard set by the group to behave in a certain way.

Even if no one tells the teenager to smoke a cigarette in the example above, the teen may still feel pressured by their peers to partake in the activity because it seems like everyone is doing it.

Direct vs. Indirect Peer Pressure

Direct peer pressure is when a person uses verbal or nonverbal cues to persuade someone to do something. The example mentioned above of a teen handing another teen a cigarette is also an instance of direct peer pressure because the teen on the receiving end must decide on the spot how they're going to respond.

With indirect peer pressure, no one is singling you out, but the environment you're in may influence you to do something. If you're at a party where everyone is drinking, for instance, you might feel pressured to drink even if no one asks you to.

Positive vs. Negative Peer Pressure

Finally, peer pressure can be described as either positive or negative. Positive peer pressure is when a person is influenced by others to engage in a beneficial or productive behavior.

Negative peer pressure is the influence a person faces to do something they wouldn't normally do or don't want to do as a way of fitting in with a social group. People often face negative peer pressure to drink alcohol, do drugs, or have sex.

Examples of Peer Pressure

Peer pressure causes people to do things they would not otherwise do with the hope of fitting in or being noticed.

Things people may be peer pressured into doing include:

  • Acting aggressively (common among men)
  • Bullying others
  • Doing drugs
  • Dressing a certain way
  • Drinking alcohol
  • Engaging in vandalism or other criminal activities
  • Physically fighting
  • Only socializing with a certain group

Peer pressure or the desire to impress their peers can override a teen or tween's fear of taking risks, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse for Kids. Risky behavior with drugs and/or alcohol may result in the following:

  • Alcohol or drug poisoning
  • Asphyxiation
  • Driving under the influence (of alcohol or other drugs)
  • Sexually transmitted diseases

Behavioral Addiction

People can also feel an internal pressure to participate in activities and behaviors they think their peers are doing, which can put them at risk for the following behavioral addictions:

  • Food addiction
  • Gambling addiction
  • Internet addiction
  • Sex addiction
  • Shopping addiction
  • Video game addiction

In the case of teens, parents are rarely concerned about the peer pressure their kids may face to engage in sports or exercise, as these are typically seen as healthy social behaviors. This is OK, as long as the exercise or sport does not become an unhealthy way of coping, excessive to the point of negatively affecting their health, or dangerous (as in dangerous sports).

What starts out as positive peer pressure may become negative pressure if it leads a person to over-identify with sports, for example, putting exercise and competition above all else.

If taken to an extreme, they may develop exercise addiction , causing them to neglect schoolwork and social activities, and ultimately, use exercise and competition in sports as their main outlet for coping with the stresses of life. This can also lead to numerous health consequences.

Examples of Positive Peer Influence

We tend to hear more about the potentially negative effects of peer pressure. But the reality is, peer pressure can be positive. For instance, two friends might put positive pressure on each other to go to the gym together and stay accountable for their fitness goals.

Teens who volunteer in their community can keep each other motivated to participate. This involvement can lead to exposure to role models and eventually lead to the teens becoming positive role models themselves.

You can also positively peer pressure others by the way you respond to situations. For instance, if your friend is body-shaming another person, you can say, "Actually, it can be really harmful to criticize people's bodies like that."

In turn, your friend might reconsider criticizing people based on their appearance. By simply adhering to your own values and sharing them with a friend, you can positively peer pressure them to think before making a negative comment.

Parental Influence vs. Peer Pressure

Although parents worry about the influence of peers, overall, parents also can have a strong influence on whether children succumb to negative peer pressure.

Rather than worrying about the effects of their children's friendships, parents would do well to focus on creating a positive, supportive home environment. That way, even if your child is peer pressured to do something they don't want to do, they'll feel comfortable coming to you to talk about it first.

Role modeling good emotional self-regulation may also help your child stick to their own values when it comes to peer pressure. Self-regulation involves the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to manage current behavior and achieve long-term goals.

This will teach your child positive ways of solving problems and coping with uncomfortable feelings, rather than trying to escape by doing things to fit into a crowd. Peer pressure to take potentially harmful risks can be balanced by parents ensuring that they set appropriate boundaries, provide support, and help to avoid risks. A few examples:

  • Pick up your child from events where alcohol or drugs may have been consumed.
  • Provide balanced, truthful information on issues such as alcohol and drug use.
  • Stay involved in your child's life. Believe it or not, you are one of their biggest influences and they listen when you talk.
  • Urge the importance of thinking before doing. Teach teens to ask themselves questions like: Could this harm me or someone else? Will this put my health or safety at risk? Is it legal? What are the long-term consequences for my health, family, education, and future?

Peer Pressure Beyond Childhood

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure because they are at a stage of development when they are separating more from their parents' influence, but have not yet established their own values or understanding about human relationships or the consequences of their behavior.

They are also typically striving for social acceptance and are more willing to engage in behaviors against their better judgment in order to be accepted.

However, adults are also vulnerable to peer pressure. Many adults are susceptible to drinking too much because their friends are doing it, or putting work before family because they're competing with other people in their office for a promotion.

The bottom line: Being aware of, and carefully choosing the influence of peers that will lead to healthy and happy experiences is a lifelong process.

How to Deal With Peer Pressure

Dealing with peer pressure can be difficult, but below are some ways to help address it.

Take Your Time

Instead of quickly agreeing to do something you'd rather not do, pause and take a few deep breaths . If someone is waiting for you to answer them, tell them you need to take a few days and think about it. It's easier to resist the pressure when you put some time and space between yourself and the situation.

Consider Your Reasons

When you're faced with a choice, ask yourself what your reasons are for doing something. If it's because all of your friends are doing it and you're afraid they won't talk to you if you don't join them, then you may want to reconsider.

You deserve to surround yourself with supportive people who respect your decisions—not people who pressure you into doing something that doesn't feel right.

Set Boundaries

Saying "no" can be hard, but it's necessary to set healthy boundaries in relationships. If someone persistently pressures you to do something, you can try telling them how it affects you.

For instance, you might say something like, "It upsets me when you offer me a cigarette when you know I don't smoke. I won't be able to keep hanging out with you if you don't respect my answer."

Offer an Alternative

It's possible that a friend who is peer pressuring you simply wants to spend more time with you or connect with you, but they don't know how else to ask.

If they pressure you to do shots with them at the bar when you aren't drinking, for example, you might suggest that you both hit the dance floor instead. Or maybe, you make a plan to go on a hike or to the movies the next time you hang out. That way, you're fulfilling both of your needs in a mutually beneficial way.

Graupensperger SA, Benson AJ, Evans MB. Everyone else is doing it: The association between social identity and susceptibility to peer influence in NCAA athletes .  J Sport Exerc Psychol . 2018;40(3):117-127. doi:10.1123/jsep.2017-0339

Morris H, Larsen J, Catterall E, et al.  Peer pressure and alcohol consumption in adults living in the UK: A systematic qualitative review .  BMC Public Health.  2014;20:1014. doi:10.1186/s12889-020-09060-2

Clark DA, Donnellan MB, Durbin CE, et al. Sex, drugs, and early emerging risk: Examining the association between sexual debut and substance use across adolescence . PLoS ONE. 2020;15(2):e0228432. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0228432

Stanaland A, Gaither S. “Be a man”: The role of social pressure in eliciting men’s aggressive cognition . Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2021;47(11):1596-1611. doi:10.1177/0146167220984298

Sabramani V, Idris IB, Ismail H, Nadarajaw T, Zakaria E, Kamaluddin MR. Bullying and its associated individual, peer, family and school factors: Evidence from Malaysian National Secondary School students .  Int J Environ Res Public Health . 2021;18(13):7208. doi:10.3390/ijerph18137208

Kim J, Fletcher JM. The influence of classmates on adolescent criminal activities in the United States .  Deviant Behav . 2018;39(3):275-292. doi:10.1080/01639625.2016.1269563

National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens. Why Does Peer Pressure Influence Teens To Try Drugs? .

Pamela Rackow, Urte Scholz, Rainer Hornung.  Received social support and exercising: An intervention study to test the enabling hypothesis .  British Journal of Health Psychology , 2015;20(4):763. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12139

Vogel L. Fat shaming is making people sicker and heavier .  CMAJ . 2019;191(23):E649. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-5758

Dhull P, Beniwal RD. Dealing with peer pressure . Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. 2017;7.

By Elizabeth Hartney, BSc, MSc, MA, PhD Elizabeth Hartney, BSc, MSc, MA, PhD is a psychologist, professor, and Director of the Centre for Health Leadership and Research at Royal Roads University, Canada.  

Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance Essay

Peer pressure is an important problem for teenagers. The primary reason behind it is the need to belong. At a particular age, a teenager starts to feel a need to figure out their identities and belong to a particular group. Often, group members are required to behave in a certain way. They feel pressure from other peers if they do not do it. Such conflicts can negatively affect children’s psychological and social behavior. Therefore, it is highly important to understand the reasons for peer pressure and possible ways to withstand it.

One of the most popular types of peer pressure is forcing someone to smoke or use alcohol or drugs (MacArthur et al. 392). It is a widespread situation when a teenager starts to practice unhealthy behavior under the pressure of peers of their group. For example, let us imagine Jack, who is forced to smoke by his friends John and James.

It is important to understand that there are several ways to resist the pressure. First of all, everyone who feels peer pressure should remember that he or she has a right to say “no” to other people if he or she does not want to do something (“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure”). Thus, the most effective way for Jack to refuse to smoke is to say “no.” If it is necessary, he should repeat this “no” several times. He should look into his friends’ eyes and be confident.

Also, it is important for Jack to avoid situations that are bringing him under peer pressure, for example, parties where people smoke (“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure”). If Jack does not stay in a company where everybody smokes, he will not feel the pressure to do it. However, this measure could be a way to isolation. Thus, Jack should not avoid all social activities.

Jack could feel afraid that he would lose his friends, but it is not the only possible outcome. For example, he could ask John and James why they smoke, how long they do it, what benefits they obtain from smoking (“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure”). A dialog is a good way to resist the pressure because, in dialogs, peers’ roles can change, and a victim can become a leader. If it does not help, and Jack continues to feel pressure, it is possible for him to find support from other teenagers who do not smoke (“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure”). In this situation, Jack will not be alone.

Finally, Jack can find other friends who do not smoke and/or do not want him to do that (“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure”). These friends will accept Jack’s personality and will not want him to change, which is the most important in a friendship. In conclusion, everyone could use the refusal skills to say “no” and not to do something against one’s will.

Works Cited

“20 Ways to Avoid Peer Pressure.” Your Life Counts , 2017, Web.

MacArthur, Georgie J., et al. “Peer‐led Interventions to Prevent Tobacco, Alcohol and/or Drug Use among Young People Aged 11–21 Years: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis.” Addiction, vol. 111, no. 3, 2016, pp. 391-407.

  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, May 10). Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peer-pressure-essay/

"Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance." IvyPanda , 10 May 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/peer-pressure-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance'. 10 May.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance." May 10, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peer-pressure-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance." May 10, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peer-pressure-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance." May 10, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peer-pressure-essay/.

  • "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" a Short Story by Richard Wright
  • Troika Dialog Operation in the CIS Market
  • Discussion of Exposure to Fire Smokes
  • "The Body in Room 348" by Mark Bowden
  • “Guys and Dolls” by Frank Loesser
  • Implications of Inter-Religious Dialog Towards a Universal Theology of Religion
  • The Role of Language in African American Sociocultural Context
  • Which Material Withstand a Fire
  • The Dialog “Crito” by Socrates
  • Theories of Addiction: General Counseling Methods
  • The Process of Listening and Its Styles
  • Perception Checking in Interpersonal Communication
  • Proxemics: Four Distances During Communication
  • Cognitive Dissonance in Dealing With Exam Cheating
  • Social Loafing and Striving During Group Work
  • Undergraduate
  • High School
  • Architecture
  • American History
  • Asian History
  • Antique Literature
  • American Literature
  • Asian Literature
  • Classic English Literature
  • World Literature
  • Creative Writing
  • Linguistics
  • Criminal Justice
  • Legal Issues
  • Anthropology
  • Archaeology
  • Political Science
  • World Affairs
  • African-American Studies
  • East European Studies
  • Latin-American Studies
  • Native-American Studies
  • West European Studies
  • Family and Consumer Science
  • Social Issues
  • Women and Gender Studies
  • Social Work
  • Natural Sciences
  • Pharmacology
  • Earth science
  • Agriculture
  • Agricultural Studies
  • Computer Science
  • IT Management
  • Mathematics
  • Investments
  • Engineering and Technology
  • Engineering
  • Aeronautics
  • Medicine and Health
  • Alternative Medicine
  • Communications and Media
  • Advertising
  • Communication Strategies
  • Public Relations
  • Educational Theories
  • Teacher's Career
  • Chicago/Turabian
  • Company Analysis
  • Education Theories
  • Shakespeare
  • Canadian Studies
  • Food Safety
  • Relation of Global Warming and Extreme Weather Condition
  • Movie Review
  • Admission Essay
  • Annotated Bibliography
  • Application Essay
  • Article Critique
  • Article Review
  • Article Writing
  • Book Review
  • Business Plan
  • Business Proposal
  • Capstone Project
  • Cover Letter
  • Creative Essay
  • Dissertation
  • Dissertation - Abstract
  • Dissertation - Conclusion
  • Dissertation - Discussion
  • Dissertation - Hypothesis
  • Dissertation - Introduction
  • Dissertation - Literature
  • Dissertation - Methodology
  • Dissertation - Results
  • GCSE Coursework
  • Grant Proposal
  • Marketing Plan
  • Multiple Choice Quiz
  • Personal Statement
  • Power Point Presentation
  • Power Point Presentation With Speaker Notes
  • Questionnaire
  • Reaction Paper

Research Paper

  • Research Proposal
  • SWOT analysis
  • Thesis Paper
  • Online Quiz
  • Literature Review
  • Movie Analysis
  • Statistics problem
  • Math Problem
  • All papers examples
  • How It Works
  • Money Back Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • We Are Hiring

The Effects of Peer Pressure on Students, Essay Example

Pages: 3

Words: 761

Hire a Writer for Custom Essay

Use 10% Off Discount: "custom10" in 1 Click 👇

You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

There are no simple answers to the effects of peer pressure on students.  It would be unfair to say that most peer pressure results in unwise decisions, as it is often generalized within current culture.  Peer pressure transforms a student in a unique manner.  The current analysis will examine the most dangerous effects of peer pressure on students, as well as the general negative and positive effects.

Dangerous Effects of Peer Pressure

There are a number of dangerous effects that peer pressure can have on students.  These effects are often felt within media and schools, which is where the perceived dangers of peer pressures lie, according to most.  However, they certainly cannot be disregarded due to the truth of these concerns.

Alcohol is felt within the consequences of peer pressure in students.  With regards to underage drinking, this is a significant problem within students, especially in high school and college.  The habits and commonplace of underage drinking is established in high school, which is then perpetuated to one’s college years.

Partying in general is another example of the more dangerous effects of peer pressure.  Younger students at parties are around others who are unsupervised, which makes them more susceptible to peer pressure.  Thus, items like drinking and other inappropriate behavior are accepted in one’s social circle.  Peer pressure is commonly seen at parties, which is where a number of dangerous activities occur.

Sex is also another example of the negative effects of peer pressure.  Students are having sex at a younger age, resulting in items like teenage pregnancies.  As underage and unprotected sex becomes accepted in social circles, peer pressure often has an effect on students in this way as well.

General Negative Effects

There are a number of generally negative effects that peer pressure can have on a student’s development.  Beyond the more dangerous effects, at least in regards to the more clearly defined negative effects, a number of underlying effects of peer pressure can be seen with students.  The dynamics that are presented in peer pressure in students can unfortunately be quite negative.

Peer pressure can often drown out the opinion of one.  When students are engaged in certain social circles, it is not uncommon to see the unfair treatment of individuals.  Certain individuals, whether they are not liked, ignored, or just not seen, are often unable to relate to others.

Peer pressure also removes the choices that one should be able to make.  A number of events and activities that students are involved in are done on a social level.  Such activities remove the healthy choices that enable students to seek adventure and healthy activities, instead of what is expected or on schedule.

The underlying negative dynamic of peer pressure is the ultimate undermining of individuality.  Peer pressure has the unfortunate effect of removing one’s own will and desires, in order to become accepted or liked within a social circle.  As seen in these negative examples and in the more dangerous illustrations, the individual is often casted our in peer pressure.  As a result, one is left to follow others in that of peer pressure.

General Positive Effects

Peer pressure can of course have positive effects on students.  While this is often not portrayed, it rings true for many students.  It can often push and help one to realize or perform something, to help someone thrive with the help of others.

Peer pressure can help individuals in more difficult periods.  Friends are there to help someone in tough times, and peer pressure can help someone who needs wise council.  Many students, who are involved with the right people, are able to enjoy the positive relationships when they need them the most.

Some activities driven by peer pressure can help students get involved.  Activities and functions can be great for the social development of a student.  Peer pressure, even when applied outside of one’s comfort zone, can ultimately be beneficial.

Peer pressure can also help individuals make the right choices.  When students face difficult choices in their life, they often rely on their friends.  In this manner peer pressure can help persuade one to the right decision, allowing their friend to see the positive way to react to an important choice.

It is unfortunate that peer pressure is often regarded in one dimension.  While there are certainly negative effects of peer pressure, such as those that undermine one’s individuality and encourage dangerous practices, peer pressure can help an individual develop through the difficult times as a student and a person.  Centered on surrounding oneself with positive influences, peer pressure can rise above the negative effects to institute healthy social and personal steps of one’s development.

Stuck with your Essay?

Get in touch with one of our experts for instant help!

Restructuring For Growth, Research Paper Example

Just Web Internet Policy Manual, Essay Example

Time is precious

don’t waste it!

Plagiarism-free guarantee

Privacy guarantee

Secure checkout

Money back guarantee

E-book

Related Essay Samples & Examples

Voting as a civic responsibility, essay example.

Pages: 1

Words: 287

Utilitarianism and Its Applications, Essay Example

Words: 356

The Age-Related Changes of the Older Person, Essay Example

Pages: 2

Words: 448

The Problems ESOL Teachers Face, Essay Example

Pages: 8

Words: 2293

Should English Be the Primary Language? Essay Example

Pages: 4

Words: 999

The Term “Social Construction of Reality”, Essay Example

Words: 371

  • Essay Samples
  • College Essay
  • Writing Tools
  • Writing guide

Logo

Peer pressure is good for self-development.

In my essay, I hope to prove that positive peer pressure is good for self-development and that even negative peer pressure may help some people develop. I contend that positive peer pressure may force a person to excel, and that fighting negative peer pressure may help build character.

Peer pressure is the social influence that people in your particular group have over you. People pleasers are typically more prone to peer pressure, and people with more to lose from losing their group are prone to peer pressure. A common example of people having more to lose is with gangs in the US. Members of the gang will often have little else in their lives to enable them to walk away from their gang. In that case, if they are pressured into doing something for the gang, then the member is more susceptible because he or she cannot risk losing membership in the gang. (Montgomery, 1996).

I contend that positive peer pressure may force a person to excel. Sports and competitive events seem to prove this. People who enter competitive events are typically forced to work hard because of their own will and because they have people relying on them to perform well. If a competitor does well, then that competitor is adored by his or her peer group. If a competitor does well, then he or she may experience things such as scorn, threats and even physical violence. Competitors in sporting and competitive events are therefore encouraged to do well and excel because of peer pressure. (Claesen, 1986).

Fighting negative peer pressure may help build character. Peer pressure that is directed towards negative actions or events is likely to cause a person to do negative things or take part in negative events. If a person is able to fight such peer pressure and fight against all the risks that come with fighting peer pressure, then it may help build character. It is quite a conservative thought in many cases because the person under pressure is forced to use his or her head rather than his or her feelings. Such a conservative attitude, such as the ability to fight peer pressure when risk is involved, is a conservative attitude that helps a person build character. It means that person is able to make his or her own decisions without allowing other people to bully him or her. (Kandel, 1992).

There are times when a person develops on his or her own, and there are times when self-development is forced. In the case of peer pressure, it appears that force may be necessary. A person may develop on his or her own, but peer pressure may force the issue. The only downside is that peer pressure may force people through stages of development that they are not ready for. For example, sports athletes may be pushed too hard until they burn out, and people may be encouraged to take part in negative events and may be too immature to fight negative peer pressure. There are downsides to peer pressure, but those downsides do not eradicate the potential upsides if they are correctly harnessed. (Hansen, 1991).

Peer pressure has its pros and its cons, but on the whole, it may help a person develop both emotionally and socially. Positive peer pressure may have negative effects, but the outcome is often a positive one. On the other hand, if a person is able to experience negative peer pressure and fight it, then it may have a dramatic effect on his or her personal development. It may also help that person become more mature because a mature person is able to put something on the line and risk it in order to grow.

Bibliography

Claesen, Donna Rae, B. Bradford Brown, and Sue Ann Eicher. “Perceptions of peer pressure, peer conformity dispositions, and self-reported behavior among adolescents.” Developmental psychology 22.4 (1986): 521-530.

Hansen, William B., and John W. Graham. “Preventing alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette use among adolescents: Peer pressure resistance training versus establishing conservative norms.” Preventive medicine 20.3 (1991): 414-430.

Kandel, Eugene, and Edward P. Lazear. “Peer pressure and partnerships.” Journal of political Economy 100.4 (1992): 801-817.

Montgomery, Richard. “Disciplining or protecting the poor? Avoiding the social costs of peer pressure in micro-credit schemes.” Journal of international development 8.2 (1996): 289-305.

Get 20% off

Follow Us on Social Media

Twitter

Get more free essays

More Assays

Most useful resources for students:

  • Free Essays Download
  • Writing Tools List
  • Proofreading Services
  • Universities Rating

Contributors Bio

Contributor photo

Find more useful services for students

Free plagiarism check, professional editing, online tutoring, free grammar check.

Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Social Psychology — The Influence of Social Pressure

test_template

The Influence of Social Pressure

  • Categories: Aesthetics Peer Pressure Social Psychology

About this sample

close

Words: 514 |

Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 514 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Image of Dr. Oliver Johnson

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

  • 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
  • Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

author

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

  • Expert in: Arts & Culture Social Issues Psychology

writer

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1483 words

2 pages / 1120 words

5 pages / 2203 words

3 pages / 1178 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Social Psychology

Social dilemmas happen when the members of a group, culture, or society are in possible conflict over the establishment and use of shared “public goods”. Public goods are benefits that are shared by a community and that everyone [...]

Racism is a deeply ingrained issue in society that continues to plague communities across the globe. While overt acts of racism are widely condemned, there exists a more insidious form of racism that often goes unnoticed: the [...]

Florida, the Sunshine State, is a popular destination for travelers seeking warm weather, beautiful beaches, and a variety of attractions. I recently had the opportunity to visit Florida for a week-long vacation, and the [...]

The terms "introvert" and "extrovert" were first popularized by the famous psychologist Carl Jung in the early 20th century. According to Jung, introverts are people who tend to be more reserved, reflective, and self-reliant, [...]

Charles Horton Cooley, an American sociologist, introduced the concept of the "looking-glass self" in his work "Human Nature and the Social Order" in 1902. This theory suggests that our self-concept and self-esteem are formed [...]

What is psychology, what is science, is psychology considered science or art? We can easily answer the first two questions but to decide whether psychology is science or art has been a never-ending debate. Psychology has earned [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

  • Instructions Followed To The Letter
  • Deadlines Met At Every Stage
  • Unique And Plagiarism Free

peer pressure is beneficial essay

TheNextSkill

Speech On Peer Pressure [1,2,3 Minutes]

In today’s competitive environment, everyone feels peer pressure. Some people consider it to be helpful while others believe peer pressure is not always beneficial. Hence, It has become an important issue to discuss and find out the advantages and disadvantages of peer pressure.

In this article, there are many examples of speech on peer pressure of 1, 2 and 3 minutes in duration. It will also help you understand a short and simple definition, the types, and the purpose of peer pressure. This will help you write a good speech.

1 Minute Speech On Peer Pressure

Hello and welcome all of you gathered here. I am here to share my thoughts on peer pressure.

If you are a student, your classmates are your peers. If you are an employee, your colleagues are. The actions of your peers impact you in a positive way or a negative way. These actions drive you to do the same irrespective of what your goals are.

Peer pressure drives you to think of a competitor to your group. This way, people suffer from anxiety and depression. This is why peer pressure is considered a negative term. It completely depends on the person who handles it. Only he or she can get the advantages of peer pressure.

Dealing with peer pressure is an art. If one knows how to use it to help in growth, it can be proved helpful. Hence, it becomes important to explain to children the ways to handle peer pressure in earlier stages of life so that they lead a stress-free life. Thank you!

Short Speech On Peer Pressure

2-Minute Speech On Peer Pressure

Before I deliver my speech I would like to wish you all the best wishes & I also want to thank you a lot for having me a chance to share my views on this important topic i.e. peer pressure.

What is peer pressure? Some of us understand it well. Anyway, I want to explain it in my own words. Please let me know if I say anything wrong.

Here is an important word “peer” to be understood clearly. The word “ Peer ” comes from the Latin which means equal . A peer is someone at your own level. For example; if you are a 12th grader, your classmates are your peers.

“As we know that we are social creatures. We want to grow on the same level as others in the society. This aspiration of growth drives us to be competitive with others . Also, this leaves a pressure on our psychological health. This pressure is simply called peer pressure.”

Now, a question arises in the mind; Is peer pressure beneficial? Different people have different thoughts on this. Some people consider it to be helpful while others believe peer pressure is not always beneficial. Hence, It has become an important issue to discuss and find out the advantages and disadvantages of peer pressure.

If we think unbiased, peer pressure is neither beneficial nor harmful. It has some positive and some negative impacts. On the one hand, Peer pressure helps students to motivate to do extraordinary. On the other hand, it can cause them to suffer from fear of failure.

Hence, it has both impacts of one side. Peer pressure is not limited to students, people feel peer pressure in each sphere of life. Most importantly, many people suffer from severe depression and anxiety. It completely depends on the person and how he handles peer pressure.

To sum it up , it becomes important to explain to children the ways to handle peer pressure in earlier stages of life so that they lead a stress-free life.

This is all thought about peer pressure. I hope it was helpful, Thank you!

Speech On Peer Pressure | 3 Minutes

I warmly welcome all of you gathered here. I am here to deliver a speech on peer pressure. Before I start my speech, I would like to wish you a good day. Also, I want to thank you for having me this valuable opportunity.

Peer pressure is an important issue in contemporary times. I think some of us are well aware of what is peer pressure but I want to explain it so that everyone here can understand the topic well.

Peer pressure is pressure left by our peers. Now, we need to understand who are our peers. The word “ Peer ” comes from the Latin which means equal . A peer is someone at your own level. For example; If you are an employee, your colleagues are your peers.

Peer pressure is classified into many types but it has two main types; positive and negative peer pressure. For example; When your peers achieve a milestone, you compare yourself to them and start working for the same. This is called positive peer pressure .

Opposite to this, when your smoker friends push you to smoke as they believe it to be cool. This is called negative peer pressure . Sometimes you want to say no but peer pressure drives you to make poor choices by not saying “no”. This tendency lowers your self-esteem.

Hence, peer pressure has both negative and positive impacts. It completely depends on the person and how he or she handles peer pressure. Most importantly, many people suffer from severe depression and anxiety and peer pressure can be of any kind.

To avoid the negative impacts of peer pressure, one needs to make decisions wisely. In this process, one can practice some of the common practices. Some of them are;

1. Learn to Say “No”

Saying no is an important ritual for avoiding doing things you don’t want to do. Explain clear reasons behind your refusal. If your peers don’t understand, you should leave their company.

2. Make Friends with similar values

People develop their personalities according to the values received. If you make friends who have similar values, they will understand you well and not force you to do something.

3. Get Away from the pressure Zone

One of the best methods to prevent peer pressure is to walk away from where you feel negative peer pressure. You can spend time alone to figure out your goals and ways.

To sum it up, our brain is our greatest tool that can help us find solutions for every kind of problem. Just find out your ways to eliminate negative peer pressure from the equation. Thank you!

Long Speech On Peer Pressure

Other Speeches

Importance of time management speech [1,2,3 minutes], speech on ethics and etiquette [1,2,3 minutes], speech about mahatma gandhi jayanti 2023.

  • 1 Minute Speech On Health Is Wealth
  • 2 Minute Speech On Child Labour
  • 1 Minute Speech On Child Labour
  • Speech On Nature [ 1-2 minutes ]
  • 2 Minute Speech on Importance Of Education
  • 1 Minute Speech on Pollution
  • 2 Minute Speech on Population Explosion

Essay On The Importance Of Education

Related Posts

Speech on Time management

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

  • Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

Supported by

The Ezra Klein Show

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Jennifer Sciubba

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Jennifer Sciubba. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

The Ezra Klein Show Poster

Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?

The demographer jennifer d. sciubba examines why families — even in wealthy nations — are having fewer children..

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So, for a long time, the population concern we’ve been used to hearing is that we are racing towards too many people too quickly. This was a Malthusian fear in the 18th century that more people would mean more starvation. This was and is the fear of many environmentalists today, that more people means more weight on the planet’s resources, more environmental damage.

But now there’s this other concern that has come to join it, that we are racing towards de-population — too few people too quickly. As countries get richer the world over, fertility rates plummet, plummet quickly. In countries like America, we’re now below replacement rate, the rate at which a population holds steady. You see that in China. You see that in India. In some countries like Japan and South Korea, they’re so far below replacement rate that their population is going to rapidly shrink generation by generation.

If you spend much time on today’s right or among the Silicon Valley VC class, you find the set of fears has become, for them, almost what the climate crisis is for the left. You hear about it constantly. For many, it feels apocalyptic. It is the overarching context in which everything else is playing out.

But even if you don’t quite know how to feel about it, and I don’t always know how to feel about it, it’s also just kind of strange. You wouldn’t necessarily think that societies would have so many fewer children as they become richer. Money makes life easier. Lower child mortality makes the heart rending grief of losing a child less likely. Being better able to provide for your children would maybe make it easier to have more of them. Many people believe a boisterous family is part of the vision of a full life.

But fertility rates, they keep falling and falling. And even in the places where that fall has turned into freefall, where the very fabric of the society is now in question, policy to turn it around is proving completely ineffectual. So, why? We’re going to do two episodes on this, but the first is going to be about the global big picture.

Jennifer Sciubba is a political scientist, a demographer, and the author of the book, “8 Billion and Counting.” I asked her on the show to guide me through what these population numbers actually tell us, what they say in different regions of the world, how they might play out, and what they reveal about what happens to societies as they get richer. As always, my email, [email protected].

Jennifer Sciubba, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

So, tell me what the total fertility rate is.

So, the total fertility rate is — let’s just say it’s the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime. It’s a great measure because in one number, you can kind of get a snapshot to compare across time and across places.

So, when I listen to the conversation about total fertility rates, there are sort of two conversations right now happening at the same time. One conversation that I sometimes hear on my left — I get a lot of it in my email inbox for this show — is that it’s way too high. There are too many people. There are going to be even more people.

Through that conversation — I hear it more on my right — it’s all over opinion sections now — is that it’s way too low. We’re facing a demographic bust. We’re going to see population collapse. We are a planet growing old, certainly a bunch of countries growing old. How would you describe the shape of the total fertility rate and how it differs in different places right now?

Well, you nailed it. That’s exactly what the conversation looks like. It’s like Goldilocks is in the room here with us, right? It’s either too high or it’s too low, and it’s never just right. So while we are perceiving this on the left and right in the world today, I will say that it’s, as a student of population history, it’s kind of been like that for a long time, this perception about global fertility.

So, if we look at global population last century, we saw exponential growth, from 1.6 billion at the start of that century to 6.1 billion by the end. Women have, on average, worldwide, about 2.2 children these days. Basically, that is replacement level because that point number, the 0.2 in this case, accounts for children who might not make it to reproductive age. So it’s, in very crude terms, a margin of error. So we’re basically globally at this number.

But in this century so far, we are in a global demographic divide. This is a century about differential growth at this moment. So, we have very low fertility rates in some places, while it’s still high in others. For example, the area in the world where it really is the highest is in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a handful of countries where it’s still pretty high, over five children per woman on average.

So, there’s a divide, but we’re all moving kind of in the same direction. So when we think about going forward into the second part of the century, that’s really where we’re all going to start converging down at those lower levels. But I could tell you that, and a listener will have a reaction in one direction or the other. I talked to a lot of folks from an environmental standpoint, and they say, thank goodness. Let’s push it lower.

And then, of course, we know those factions in the U.S. — Elon Musk, for example, sees the number and says, that is too low. It needs to be higher. So, it’s a great caveat for us to set out at the beginning that we might be talking about all kinds of numbers and places, but perception and feelings about those numbers, they go hand in hand with this.

How true is this statement? As countries get richer and more educated, their fertility rate drops.

If we’re trying to make it a causal statement, it is somewhat true and only partially, because we have some really interesting, huge examples where that has not been the case. And let’s take India, for example. So a lot of people do not realize that India is already really below replacement level for the whole country.

And what’s so amazing about that is, a lot of people may remember Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book, “Population Bomb,” by talking about a trip he made to India. And there were people everywhere, people on the streets, people eating, people drinking, people sleeping, people, people, people. And now, those people have a total fertility rate below replacement level. And India is not a wealthy country. So, it’s not the case that economic growth preceded declines in fertility rates because state policy can serve that interventionist role.

So, but I want to pick this apart because I hear you saying two things here. One is that you have countries that have not traveled all that rapidly up the education, income scale, though India has traveled somewhat up the education, income scale. I mean, there’s been a lot of development there.

But you have countries where you’ve seen a sharp fall in the fertility rate without a very sharp rise, let’s call it in median incomes. But I’m also asking a question slightly to the side of it. If a country has gotten richer, if I just tell you country A and do not name country A has gotten significantly richer, that country A is now highly educated, highly literate, it is wealthy, does that allow you to predict with a high level of certainty that country A is probably going to be low fertility rate, probably below replacement level?

It sure does. Yes.

Let me ask you why. Because this, to me, is the slightly mysterious thing at the heart of this conversation and my interest in it, which is I know it is a demographic fact that when you look around the world, rich countries, more educated countries have fewer children. It does not seem obvious to me that’s the way it would have worked out, right?

You have a world in which your kids are more likely to survive. You have more money. You can get more help. Your life is better. You can give them a better life. You can take them to Chuck E. Cheese, perhaps, as I’m doing later with my kid, who just turned five. Lots of things have gotten easier for you. And that might mean, oh, you can actually have more children, or certainly, a lot of children, right? But in fact, it goes the opposite way. So, why is that? Why does wealth lead to fewer children?

It sure does, and you are right that this is, in some ways, counterintuitive. Well, sure, we’ve got those rising income, rising education. We’ve also got shifting values and norms. And listen, I’m a political scientist. I’m a trained political scientist. We absolutely talk about values and norms. We also know that it’s really hard to measure some of these and it’s really hard to put them in a causal chain.

So, when I’m thinking about reflecting back on these big changes and looking at the literatures and looking at all the causality, that’s the one that I think has us where we are today. There’s been a tremendous shift in values and norms. And so, I think about my own life. So I have two children. And I have values beyond just wanting those children. Sorry to them if they listen to this. Thank goodness, they probably won’t, till they’re older. I do value my free time. I do value a nice meal at a restaurant. I value time with friends, time with my spouse, et cetera, et cetera. I value my career. And I value time with them the most. But you know what? It does compete for time.

And I think it’s that value shift, is that as we are more educated, as we have more income earning opportunities outside the home, as our standards of living rise, the number of children that we want shifts because it competes with other things that we want. I don’t know if you find that to be the case for you and your peer group as well. But that’s the case in my peer group, certainly.

I do find it to be the case. Is a different way of saying this that as countries become richer and more educated, they become more individualistic. And when you’re more individualistic, and people are making decisions more about their life, their self-expression, their set of choices, do I want to travel, do I want to become a PhD in political science, that, then, children are one choice competing among many?

I think that is part of it. And I think it’s just even more complicated than that. And I come back all the time to reflecting on the term “family planning” because family planning, in the greatest sense of it, is, you plan and decide when you get to have children. And when you can make that choice, it becomes really difficult to decide, is now the right time? Is now the right time? Will I be in a better position to do this in five years?

So, I think yes to the individualism, but I also think the literal logistics of it, deciding when to do something, it’s another kind of pressure that pushes downward. You kind of keep putting that off. As we know, as parents, there’s actually never an ideal time to do this. There’s always some reason not to. But I think it is that ultimate planning. We can’t leave that part out.

That’s an important corrective, I think, to something buried in my individualism hypothesis, which is that, as you were saying earlier, there’s a culture here. If I had told my parents — I met my partner when we were 24.

And if we had gotten pregnant at 24, that would have been, in the scope of human history, maybe even a bit on the late side. In the global picture, totally normal. And in the picture for college-educated, career-ambitious Americans, pretty unusual. And if we’d said we’re having kids at 24, a lot of people are like, you are? Did the birth control fail?

Exactly. Uh-oh. What’d you do wrong?

Right? That there is a culture around you of, when do things look normal? And also, we’d have been the only ones in our friend group with kids at that point. And so, there is this way in which, yes, there’s a lot of individualism, but the individualism also has very potent cultural grooves, right? You’re supposed to go and get education, and then more education and then more education, and then establish yourself in your career and be financially in a good spot, and of course, be married.

And by the time you’ve done all that, you might be 30. You might be 32. You might be 36. And even if you wanted to have three or four kids at that point, you do end up running, particularly for women, into a biological clock problem.

Yeah. So, for the total fertility rate for the U.S., writ large, is about 1.6 to 1.7 children per woman. So, it’s decently below replacement level there. For the more education you get, typically, the lower it is. It’s this success sequence that we talk about. OK, you’re going to raise your kids to say you’re going to get lots of education. Then you’re going to get a great job. You’re going to buy a home. You’re going to start a retirement account and get some savings and then have children. So, any little blip along that would then push that off more and more.

Something you mentioned that I think is very important is this idea that maybe within this larger individualistic culture and within this larger idea of a success sequence, there are pockets. So, last time I went on a first date, I was 19 years old. That’s because I met my husband then. I was engaged. I thought about this the other day. This sounds crazy, but at 21, on Valentine’s Day, I was 21 years old, and I was engaged. I’ve now been married over 20 years.

Congratulations.

Yeah, thanks, right? That probably sounds absolutely nuts to a lot of your listeners. But you know what? I was the last one of my friends to get married. We were college-educated women. Getting married early looked very normal in my group. In other parts of the country — I mean, I’m from the South, I’m sure you can hear — it is pretty normal to get married. And then you think about my neighborhood — got lots of folks with more than two children. So, what you’re surrounded by and how you kind of measure normal behavior, acceptable behavior, those cultural values and norms, they affect your decisions around dating, marriage, and having children.

I see this in my own world. And I am part of different communities. I’ve lived in, over the past 10 years, three different cities. My communities are typically pretty highly educated. But that has been different in different groups, too.

And it’s got me thinking about this question, which, what does it mean that the more sort of choice people are exercising, the more they’re putting into their careers, oftentimes, the fewer children they’re having, often to their sadness, right? I know a lot of people who wanted to have children. It’s not worked out for them. They want to have more children than they’ve actually been able to have. And there are, obviously, values in this whole conversation.

And I will say for myself which values I feel like I should even hold are unsettled. I think there is something more important about having children than simple choice. I think there is something about the continuation of the human species. I think there’s something about the connection to things and histories and generational chains beyond you. And also, I think it’s fine for people not to have children.

But in some ways, what worries me a little bit is, if you want to, quote unquote, “succeed in America,” you end up with fewer children on average. And if you imagine an America where everybody tracks the fertility rate of the highly successful, you’re looking at America with, as I understand it, a fertility rate that begins to look more like what you’re seeing in Japan, more like things people understand as rapid demographic decline.

There’s something here. I don’t know if we always describe it as values. It might just be what the success sequence muscles out. But I think, in some ways, it’s important to ask if that is leading to the right set of values, and for people, the right set of life outcomes.

Maybe, but I actually think there’s a little bit more to it because the gap with highly educated and less highly educated is not that big anymore. However, it is true that the longer you stay in education, the more you kind of truncate the years in which you might have children, so you might not have that second or that third child.

And I’m a little unsettled about how to talk about this publicly because you can tell someone what seems like a fact — hey, educated women in the U.S. might be having fewer children. What they do with that information is not up to you. So to the degree that we have perfect information, as a woman with a PhD, to understand that if I’m planning to finish my degree before I have children, then I will need to do so in this certain amount of time in order to make sure I’m still within that window of being able to conceive. That is one thing.

To try to limit someone’s rights in terms of education or change their pathway because you care about changing their total fertility rate is different. And actually, both of those conversations are happening right now among the elite in the U.S.

Is this really something that amenable to policy change, though? One of the things that is most striking to me about the data here — and here, I’m zooming back out to the international context — is that across many different kinds of societies, including some that have seen this as a crisis for their country for some time — I think here of Japan, I think here of South Korea — the ability to shift this through policy — and people have tried a lot of different things and a lot of different kinds of messaging and tax incentives and this and that — it doesn’t really seem like anything has worked.

This seems like something beyond what, at least, policy at the imaginable margins of things you could pass — you know, get a tax payment for having a kid, you get your income taxes knocked off, you get universal pre-K and child care and health care and the Scandinavian Social Security net, et cetera — it doesn’t really seem to do much. I mean, almost all these countries are converging downwards.

And in the most extreme cases — again, I think here of South Korea, which I believe is now below total fertility rate of one, so I mean, you’re entering geometric decline — they’ve not been able to turn that around. So, why doesn’t policy have more effect here? And what do you learn from some of the extreme cases, like some of these East Asian countries where this has been seen as a genuine threat?

You are absolutely right, yes. State policy is pretty effective at being able to take a high fertility society to a lower fertility one. It is generally pretty ineffective at a sustained rate. That’s why I say, this is a permanent shift for us. And so, as a researcher, we want to isolate a variable the same way that a policymaker does. If you can nail it down to the top one or two reasons why a fertility rate is low, then you could presumably put a policy in place to change that.

So let’s say, for example, we know, through research, that a lot of folks say that high child care cost is a factor in their decision-making around having children. So, a policymaker takes that information and says, all right, let’s work on subsidizing those centers, or I live in a school district that didn’t offer pre-K — that made a big difference for me financially. It would have been nice if they had offered pre-K.

But the state policy will fix that, and then people say, yeah, but also, the housing prices are really high. OK, let’s come in. Let’s talk about adjusting some mortgage rates or maybe give you some subsidies for that. Yes, but also — and it just kind of goes down the list. So, it is really hard to isolate a singular variable so that you can have a state policy. And that’s where we come back to, how do you isolate general values and general cultures?

Now, the extremes can tell us a little bit here. Throughout East Asia, which has a region with the lowest total fertility rate in the world, there is something in common. And I first learned of it when I was still an undergraduate, I think. And I actually think this is probably part of what set me into wanting to study this for the rest of my life. I studied Japan, and I remember trying to write this paper — this sounds so funny now. I think it was called like “Sex in Japan” was like my senior thesis.

And I remember learning about Japanese young women were basically being — they were being vilified, really, in the media for living this very individualistic life, rather than getting married to a man, settling down and having children. And I think now that I’ve matured in my scholarship and studied more about this, that was symbolic of an opting out.

And we see this opting out kind of running throughout East Asia. South Korea has something called the four no’s — no dating, no sex with men, no marriage, no childbirth. And so we see them have the lowest fertility rate in the world. It’s this idea that marriage is no longer required to have a good life. You can have a job. You can make money on your own. And in fact, it is not only no longer required, it might actually stifle your life because of gender relations within the household.

South Korea has paternity leave. So, there you go — state policy, right? Oh, you say there’s no maternity and paternity leave. Let’s give you that policy. But men do not take the paternity leave. And that’s the values and cultural norms there. So, those are very important in being this counter or a limit on state policies’ ability to affect change. So, there may be ways — this may be where research needs to go. How do you change culture if you want to through state policy?

Tell me about a couple of the examples here in some depth. So, there is the, I think to many people, to me, horrifying example of Romania. That sits out there. You write about it in your book. Then there’s also — I mean, as you know, Japan has done things. South Korea has done quite a bit.

Hungary recently has been trying to increase its birth rate. You’ve seen things in Scandinavian countries, as they build out a more gender equitable form of parenting. So, tell me about what examples stand out to you. And then were any of them effective in the long-term?

So, a lot of people who are aiming to raise fertility rates are trying to raise them to replacement level. And the reason they’re trying to do that is because it just gives you this nice stovepiped age structure where you got a steady number of people being born, aging into the workforce and aging out, without any strains on needing to scramble to build kindergartens or scramble to pay for Social Security.

But we really don’t have societies that hang out there at replacement level. Once they tend to fall below it, they tend to stay there. And if they are trying to get back to this elusive replacement level, we just don’t see that. And so a couple of things to talk about with this.

One is, how do you get a population, if you’re a state, to have fertility rates that go back up above replacement level? Well, you can strip away individual rights. I am not advocating for this. But we have an example of that. Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, he said, I want more Romanian babies specifically. And fertility rates were already low there.

So, what did he do? He kind of did the inverse of what China did during some of its population policies, like the one child policy, taking away contraception and making sure women couldn’t get access to legal abortion. And you did see births increase there. You also saw maternal mortality increase. You saw a lot of societal issues there.

And it was only up as long as his thumb was pressing on it. And as soon as he’s gone, it goes back down. So, no, we do not really have examples where a society goes way below and then comes back up to above replacement level and hangs out there, and everyone is happy.

A little side note here that I think is interesting — and this is really important for us to talk about. It used to be, like when I started my career, that we would talk about low fertility societies, we were talking about democracies, for the most part. Now, a quarter of our aged countries are non-democracies. So, I actually think it’s really important for us to integrate that into the conversation because it is easier to restrict rights in a non-democracy. So it is something I worry about a lot.

Well, we have a current example of this. Russia’s fertility rate is not particularly high. And one of the things Putin said often, before invading Ukraine, was that Ukraine was full of what he considered to be Russian babies, Russian people. People are, to him, power. People are understood, in many countries, to be power.

And Ukraine, as Putin understood it, was taken from Russia, taken from greater Russia. And he was going to get it back and get back all these people and get back all these children and get back all these babies. This was an articulated rationale. And it’s hard to parse exactly what led to Putin invading, but this seems to be one thing in the mix of his considerations.

I think so, too. And I think at the end of the day, why this matters is that people look at shrinking populations, of which there are already over 30 countries that are shrinking, and low fertility as an existential issue. And so, when you elevate it to an existential issue, the question becomes, what are you willing to do to change it?

Let me put aside the language of existential because I think people’s minds shut down when you begin to get into whether something is an existential threat, but is low fertility a threat? I mean, I look at South Korea, I look at Japan — I think of that certainly as a significant problem for those societies. I mean, within 50 or 60 years, their population level will convulse downwards.

Whether a fertility rate of 1.8, 1.6 is a threat, I don’t exactly know what to think about it. But there’s certainly an intuition that you would be a stronger country if you were a 2.2 or 2.4 or 2.5 than if you were at 1.4 or 1.2. How do you think about this?

I mean, you told me today. You’re giving talks there on national security. You’re giving talks on demography and finance. Presumably, those are people worried about chaos emerging from this and either thinking about how to defend against it or profit from it. So, what are you telling them?

If we zoom out on the whole and we look at how globally fertility rates have fallen from way high, six, seven children per woman, down to now two, this is a positive story. It’s something that we worked for, for decades.

How wonderful now that we can have fewer children and feel confident that those that we have will make it to reproductive age, because that’s really what happens, right? That that’s how societies do this demographic transition from high to low fertility. So, we should celebrate, generally speaking, getting to replacement, or I think even just a little bit below replacement level. I don’t raise an alarm about that. I do, however, feel alarmed when it is super low. And here’s why.

If you just told me about a hypothetical country — you said country X — their total fertility rate is seven children per woman, and that’s the only thing you told me, I could paint a picture of that country for you. And I could tell you a lot of things about that country that were probably not great. I would say, probably women and girls are not being educated. Probably, there’s not great health care. Probably, there are no jobs. And probably, it has poor governance.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you told me that a country had a fertility rate hovering around one child per woman, to some degree, I think that also reflects that there are some things in that society that are broken, that people, women particularly, although I always do hate to put it on the shoulders of women, but in those low fertility societies, it seems to be the case that women are not willing to reproduce the current social structures. They are not working for them to a huge degree, to the point that they are willing to opt out of this idea of marriage and having children, and seek a different path for themselves.

So, while low fertility, generally speaking, I think is a positive example, super low fertility is something we need to understand much more to say, does it reflect that people are not optimistic about the future? I mean, having kids is the ultimate faith that the future will be good. And we saw it go low around this time the Soviet Union collapses in Eastern Europe. People feel dismal about the future, and they don’t want to have children.

Or can people just not afford to buy a home at younger ages? Do they feel like they are isolated and insecure themselves? And if that’s the case, then those are things in society that we would want to fix, no matter what. And perhaps, the side effect, the positive externality for this will be that fertility will go up. But just trying to change that number doesn’t actually change why that number might be incredibly low in the first place.

I struggle a little bit with this question of pessimism and fertility. And so I’d like to open it up a little bit. I hear a lot from people who say they don’t want to have children because of climate change or because the world is chaos, and it’s been terrible here, and how can you bring a child into this?

And I always think when I hear that, that while there’s truth to the many, many, many, many, many problems that we face, which is primarily what this show ends up being about week after week, the people having this conversation are, to a first approximation, the best-off people in the entirety of human existence. And what it was like to be in this world in 1940, in 1810, in 1700 and 1500 and going all the way back where you have child mortality at levels that we can’t even conceive of now.

Going back to this idea that bringing children in is an act of optimism, the people having more children right now, they’re in Afghanistan, they’re in Nigeria, they’re in sub-Saharan Africa, as you mentioned. These countries are doing differently than each other. I’d much prefer to be in Nigeria than Afghanistan, but they’re not as rich as post-grad degree Americans.

And so, there’s something here that I find odd, kind of that makes you wonder, sometimes, if it’s not backwards justification, right? People for whom their children and them would have much more comfortable lives come to see it as so uncomfortable, so impossible, so riven by inequality, that they can’t imagine making that choice, and people for whom their lives are much more that way — they do live in societies with much more pressing levels of poverty, of war, et cetera — don’t see it that way. So, how do you think about that?

Well, a little caveat to that — a lot of these places that are war torn, they don’t have contraceptives, and they are not able to actually make those choices. They don’t have full choice about their reproduction. I think it does come back to this idea about choice. And I will also say that, I mean, I’m in the same bubble you’re in. I spent 15 years in academia, for example. It’s a certain set of people who just might justify their choices based on that.

If we pull out of that group a little bit, you don’t hear people talk as much about, I’m not having a child for the sake of the environment, et cetera. So I do think that is not really indicative of the U.S. as a whole. Part of the reason the U.S. total fertility rate is low is that teen birth rate is down. So, isn’t that something we worked for, for a long time? So there’s a little bit of complexity here as well between, at what point are you asking somebody how many children they want, at what point in their own lives are they, and how much can you really trust that?

So right now, I basically would not be able to have kids anymore. But if you asked me how many would you have liked to have had, I might say three. Part of why I say three is because my first two were awesome. They’re healthy, and they are also nine and 11 years old, which my friend says is the sweet spot between diapers and drugs. So they’re highly pleasant children right now.

I think to myself, I could have had a third. I would have totally nailed that. But if you had asked me that when I had 202, then I would have given you a very different answer. So, some of this is also a measurement issue for us. So we don’t know somebody in their 30s — they’re not done yet. We can’t actually find out about them. We’re learning about completed cohort fertility for people born in the 1970s right now. So, we’re always a little bit behind in our knowledge.

One other question that tracks this wealth issue is that a lot of people who are doing very well by global standards, maybe not the richest one percent of Americans or anything, but one thing you’ll hear is that it’s extraordinarily expensive to have children. And I have two children, and I’m here to confirm that it is extraordinarily expensive to have children. But of course, the people having more children are poorer.

And this seems to, though, be validated in the data that as you get wealthier, the expectations on how much you will spend on your children change, what it means for your children to keep up culturally, educationally, economically. That’s not just true for money — it’s true for time. The amount of time that more educated parents spend with their kids is really high. And it’s both beautiful.

I mean, I really treasure a lot of the time I spend with my children. And it is difficult. I don’t think people parented this intensively when they had five or six or seven kids. How do you think about that, that question, the way parenting has become both capital and time intensive, as people get more capital and time to invest in it?

I think that is a huge factor in why people have fewer children in the U.S. It obviously isn’t just money because we all have more money now than we did. We’re doing better. And so, you can’t just nail it down to say it’s expensive. It really is about this intensity. And some of that intensity is money. I’ve got friends with kids on travel baseball teams — oh, my goodness — a lot of money and a lot of time.

I just pray my kids don’t play club sports. Like, that’s the only thing I truly want as a parent, for them to not be very good at sports.

Yes, mine inherited my lack of ability, so I am winning. Yes, they’re like, can we go to the library? I’m like, you bet, sweetpea. Let’s go. Because, yes, it is just that. And one of my friends, the same one, she’s a stay-at-home mom, and she says, how do people do it if they both work? And the answer is, of course, you either have some prescriptions for some anxiety medication thtat you both pop in the morning, you try to get some help, but it’s hard to get help. People don’t live near parents who can help them, et cetera. It is just such tremendously intensive parenting. And that is the culture now.

We also see that in East Asia, by the way. So a lot of this, you do see globally. South Korea, politicians have talked about trying to change some of the requirements on entrance exams to pull away some of that pressure that each child must just be raised so intensively and perfectly in the hopes that that would then change the culture around the number of children that you have. So, yes, I think it makes a huge difference. There are only a certain number of hours in the day.

But I also think that there is a lot of negativity about parenting that’s shared in social media. Most of the stories shared about parenting online are, oh, my gosh, my toddler got into my makeup today. And I have to record a podcast with Ezra Klein. And what am I supposed to do? And I hear it a lot among 20 somethings and 30 somethings that you sure don’t make it look like it’s a lot of fun.

And during the pandemic, when all of us were on these video calls and our kids were screaming and streaming in, in the background, it didn’t make it look like it was going to be a very enjoyable enterprise because you don’t see a lot of the beautiful moments. So I think that’s in there, too. That’s in that mix.

I think a lot about this particular question because I’m so caught on it. Because on the one hand, I get the all joy, no fun theory here. And I don’t find it to be true exactly. I find there to be a lot of fun in it, but I’m also somebody with a pretty flexible job. I work a lot, but I have a fair amount of control over those hours. And I’m somebody with enough money to fill in some of the gaps that we need to fill in. So, we can go out occasionally, that kind of thing.

And the thing that keeps coming to mind for me is like this collision between two ideas. One is that maybe the way we’re doing it, it’s not that much fun. Maybe the amount of pressure we’re putting on ourselves — is my kid reading early enough, are we spending enough time together, are the weekends enriching enough — my whole weekend is planned around what might be good for my kids. It’s like playground, library, go and get a bagel, right? It’s just, it’s all kids all the time. It’s not my sense that that’s how it’s always been.

And then on the other hand, it’s not also my sense that it was always fun, that maybe it just wasn’t part of the choice structure the way we thought about our lives that everything was about how much fun it would be, how individually enriching it would be. So there is this kind of interesting question of, one, have we made it less fun than it should be? Have we made —

In a way, are we too pro-natal for society in a way that has made us low-fertility societies? Because now what it means to be pro-child is to treat your children so well you can’t imagine having more than two or three of them. And on the other side, that this question of making everything a choice about is it going to be fun for me, I mean, when you look back in human history, that’s always how we thought about things.

Yes, and we have some data on this. The one that always strikes me is that a working mother today spends more time with her child than a stay-at-home mom would have a few decades ago. We’re spending more time with our kids on average. So I absolutely think that’s the case. And I do think it matters.

This very indulgent sense that everything should maximize your pleasure, why? Why is that the case? And so, every moment as a parent is not the best in the world, but overall, I don’t know. I’ve not seen a study, like, are you sad you had your kids? I mean, probably somebody has done that. Do you wish you hadn’t had them? It’s very few people.

Something that has come up a few times here is simply that women work now. And nobody wants to go back on that, or at least, I don’t want to go back on that. But how much is that just an explanatory factor, that this idea that you’re going to have high fertility in societies where you have dual income, full-time working parents, but also there’s nobody else to take care of the kids, that that just doesn’t fit. I mean, you can say whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. You can have your tax incentives, whatever. But if you’ve got two parents working, it’s just pretty tough, particularly if they’re not making millions of dollars at their jobs.

And it’s extra tough when you don’t have a community that supports you. And I think that may be one of the biggest differences now, is that if I think about — I work a highly flexible job. My husband works a less flexible job. So we have a two-income family. But anything I need for support, I’m basically hiring out. I mean, there’s spreadsheets for if I have a work trip. OK, this one’s coming on this day. This one can’t drive. So this one has to do this, that, and the other.

We don’t have community support. That is different than saying, do you have a daycare that opens at 7:00 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. for you to drop off, and how late is pickup? The idea that you are living in a community with neighbors who almost have this communal sense of parenting is probably way too much of a phrase there, but just this supportive structure around you that’s outside of policy.

And I wonder, too, not just about the parents, but the other kids. I mean, I didn’t grow up in the long, long days ago. It still feels fairly recent to me. But I did grow up at a time — I grew up in suburban California. There are kids in almost every house on our block, and they all played outside. And they all just kind of ran around as a pack. And there were younger ones and older ones and everybody played kickball on the garages.

And it wasn’t that it was idyllic or not idyllic. And for all I know, I’m remembering this wrong. But also, whenever I just read older accounts of families, it’s like the kids are just running around. And there are other kids, and the kids take care of the kids. And in big families, the older kids take care of the younger kids.

And so, there’s this one issue of how supportive the community is and this other issue of whether or not there is this almost independent kid society, because if there is an independent kid society and the only way to create kid society is that you’re on your phone G-caling a play date with this other family from school, and no, we’re not free on Sunday, but what about three Sundays from now, then the parents are involved in every part of that, whereas it seemed my experience and from other things I can tell, that there was a little bit more of just an autonomous thing happening for kids at another point.

Yes, and I do think that makes a difference. I really do. My husband grew up in upstate New York, and he talks all the time about how he and his friends, guys in the neighborhood who were his same age in school and some a little bit older, would get on their bikes, they’d go into the woods, they’d be gone all day long, and nobody thought anything about it. And if one of our sons wants to go over to his friend’s house and he wants to ride his bike, we’re terrified to let him.

Now, part of this is where I live. Statistically, maybe you should be a little bit terrified to let him go, but probably don’t need to be quite as terrified as I am now. But there’s a sense that what if something happened? I would never forgive myself. What will other parents think if I just let my child go out because — and cross a major road. It really is a different intensity to parenting. I did not grow up in a neighborhood. I grew up in the countryside, and I grew up as an only child. But I was completely independent, and my mom wasn’t saying, OK, you have now played with that litter of puppies for too long. Perhaps you should come inside and eat a snack, or just really micromanaging my life there. And I totally am doing this to my kids. I try not to. I get that I shouldn’t.

But I think to myself, hm, have they done that activity too long? Perhaps, I should do this. And yes, you would like to go to a friend’s house? Let me text them for you because I’ve heard it’s bad for you to have phones. So, that means that I’m the person in charge of scheduling all of this for you because I’m scared for you to walk out of the house and be on your own.

So, yes, it is just a super intense parenting without this community and this autonomy. And that definitely can play a role in maybe you don’t go from one to two kids or from two to three kids. Because that’s another part of this. I think sometimes when we talk about low fertility, we think about having kids or not having kids. But there’s also the, do you have one, two, three, et cetera, and how that changes over time as well.

Yeah, to add numbers to that, I think the United States, you mentioned earlier, the fertility rate is about 1.6 — any of these surveys showing that Americans would like to have, on average, 2.7 kids. So, there’s this question of people who don’t want to have kids that gets a lot of attention, but there’s also this question of people who would like to have more children than they do.

And for one reason or another, it doesn’t work out for them, or it’s not possible for them. And that feels like a place worth putting a lot of attention into because I think everybody’s most comfortable and correctly so with having a choice and rights-based approach here. And if people could have closer to the number of kids they wanted, that’s making everybody better off, in a way.

Yes, and there’s all kinds of little things about this. And we did have two. And we talked about if you had a third, where does the car seat go? We would have to get different cars to be able to fit a third car seat because our kids were close together. I have an 11-year-old son who is not a small guy. He’s a tall guy, 90th percentile. He’s still sitting in the back seat. He’s not supposed to sit in the front seat yet of the car. And that means that only one of you can have a friend come play today if we’re going to drive you anywhere.

So, there’s just these little logistics. That difference in going from two to three is big. I have a friend who has a blended family that ends up with three kids. When they’re all together, she’s like, we have to have a different table at the restaurant. We have to have two hotel rooms. Those kinds of things, I think, do shape people’s decision-making around going from two to three kids. And then, of course, add the cost in there.

Depending on how old your kids are, how close together they are in ages, you could be paying for daycare/pre-K for three at once or college for two or three at once. It’s something that can really make a difference for how many you decide to have.

Is that a way that low fertility rates end up feeding on themselves? I lived in San Francisco, which is notoriously a quite low fertility rate major American city. And you could just feel it. You could just feel that there was not infrastructure, really, for kids. I mean, there were some playgrounds, but nothing opened early. But kids get up early. And it’s all these little things that just make it a little bit harder.

And it’s not that people are being jerks about it. It’s just that infrastructure, commerce, culture adapt to what is around it. And the more what is around it is families with very few kids or no kids, the more it tunes itself for them. I mean, this is very broadly observed, but there’s been like a big trend against restaurants really having that many reservations. And if you don’t have reservations, you’re not going there with kids because the kids are not going to sit around outside waiting for a table.

And there’s just a lot of little things like that that I feel like whenever I travel to societies with high birth rates, you really notice that they feel different. The whole thing just looks different in more ways than I can catalog, but in ways that, then, when I come back, you’re really like, oh, I live in a low birth rate society. Like, that becomes a clear thing to you.

And I think what’s remarkable about this is that there’s such a divide between rhetoric and action on this. So, in the U.S., the conversation is starting to trend toward, OK, we are a low fertility society. Uh-oh, how do we change that? That’s the rhetoric, but the question we need to ask about the action, then, is, are we really a society that values children and families? And I think in a lot of cases, the answer really is no.

I mean, I remember reading an article maybe a year or two ago about a town in Japan. It was a small town, but they were having a baby boom, so to speak. And of course, this is in a setting where fertility rates have been low for decades and one of the oldest countries on the planet. And they started trying to talk to this mayor about what are you doing differently, and the answer really was, we value and integrate children and families into everything here.

It’s not a policy, so to speak, like the kind that you might think about for policies to raise fertility. It’s a feeling, and it’s action around that. I think that’s part of why we see who’s having babies even within low fertility societies, it’s religious communities and emphasis on community.

So, within a church group, for example, if you go to a Wednesday night service at maybe a Protestant church, there is something for the kids. Someone is taking care of them. You don’t have to worry about it. You can go to your adult formation class, speak with other parents, and you’re not worried about where are the kids.

They probably have dinner there for you so you don’t have to plan that, cook that, clean that up. Kids can run around, scream, and it’s OK. And so, we do tend to see higher fertility rates among societies that are highly religious. And I think that community part plays a big role in that.

I was going to ask you about religion as an independent variable here. How much is religion a force that is capable of changing fertility rates? And on the flip side of that, how much is secularization a driver of pushing them down? Are there, in fact, any secular societies or large secular groups that have high fertility rates?

Well, I think generally speaking, religiosity matters. It’s about how religious are you, which we think about, how often do you go to services or pray, et cetera. For example, Mormons in the United States have a higher total fertility rate than those who are not religious at all, have low degrees of religiosity. And we tend to see that around the world. Secularism? Yeah, we do see lower rates there. And since we know that religiosity itself is declining, we would expect that to be a pressure towards lower.

But I think context does matter. One of the puzzles that we talk about in demography a lot is looking at Israel. And I think there’s a lot there in terms of exceptions, but a lot of folks know — and I write about this in the book — that the ultra-orthodox community in Israel has high fertility rates. But the secular Jewish community has higher than you would expect, given peers. And so, they kind of hover around replacement level.

And so, they are within this context of higher fertility rates. They’re within communities where there would be more children. And maybe, maybe that’s pressuring them higher. It gets hard for me with religion when I try to parse out these different things because there’s a lot going on with, how do you think about the future, or how do you think about the afterlife? How do you think about the purpose of why we’re here on Earth? And religious teachings do come into play there.

So, when we kind of contrast that with a lot of folks I talk to in the environmental movement, they say, we shouldn’t have humans at all because it’s bad for the planet. I mean, these are extremists, but they’re in my email inbox. And so, that’s two really different worldviews about the value of children, the value of people, the purpose of it all.

Behind both of those worldviews is not just values, although values are probably there, but also an instrumental sense of what will happen in different scenarios. So the overpopulation folks, they’re worried about the human load on the planet. More humans is, to a first approximation, more carbon dioxide, more material usage, more humans taking up habitat, eating livestock, or raised on arable land, et cetera, et cetera. Then, there’s the other side, right, the people on the right. And there are people who just believe children are an intrinsic good, that either it is a religious duty or just a beautiful thing, right? More souls in the world, more human beings who can have important, meaningful human experiences. But there’s also a view that sharp demographic decline is a catastrophe from a power and social stability perspective.

So Brink Lindsey from the Niskanen Institute writes about low fertility societies. Quote, “Whole societies will soon start to melt away. As with our personal ties to each other, our ties to the social order are weakening as well. Trust in virtually all social institutions is in relentless decline.” What he’s seeing is a world that is going to fall into a kind of chaos because relatively close to replacement rates, societies are stable, and those booming up maybe are not, but also those plummeting down are definitely not. So, how do you think about the instrumental dimension here?

I think that arguments like that suffer from a significant failure of imagination because what they’re basically saying is that you either grow infinitely, or you collapse. And there is nothing in between. And I think there’s a lot in between. We just love to be alarmist about population. We’re alarmist about it being too high in the ‘60s. We’re alarmist about it being too low today.

And so, I don’t like those arguments that say, well, if we don’t have children, societies will completely fall apart. No. They will change, but they change all the time. Sometimes they change for the better, sometimes they change for the worse. If I lived in a retirement community in Florida, I wouldn’t say, how awful are all these people and myself. What a shame that we’re all happily down here with the sunshine. Isn’t life terrible? It just looks different.

Let’s be clear here — why does low fertility matter? We’ve talked a lot about kids. But at the end of the day, it’s because it eventually leads a population to age more older versus younger people. And then — thanks, math — it will shrink. So people equate that with individual aging. And we have a terrible, pessimistic, fearful view of individual aging. And because we kind of overlay that onto population aging, how could it possibly be a nice world?

One of the other — I don’t know whether to call this a concern or prediction — maybe both — is that you’re just going to see a huge shift in world power as population rates change. So, places with more population are, over time, going to become more powerful. Places with less are going to become less powerful. I think certainly at extreme levels, that is true, right? South Korea is falling by half generation after generation, or more than half. I do think it is going to see its power and sway reduced, and I think it is going to be in more danger from neighbors.

And then even within societies, right, there’s this question of who is gaining power in it. So I mean, it’s a common concern, or at least, observation in Israeli politics, the very high birth rates of the Orthodox have made the Orthodox faction in Israeli politics much more powerful, which has swung Israeli politics to the right. So, how do you think about that way in which, over time, this leads to who has numbers, and thus sway, in society?

I think it’s a very different answer depending on if we’re at the global level or a subnational level. So, if we’re at the global level, does population equal power? Nah. You know why? Because the rules of the game are already written. So, I tend to be an institutionalist in political science terms, meaning I think a lot about the power of the structures, the power of the rules of the game.

And guess what? Those are so set in stone right now that to think about India challenging those rules, challenging that order, it’s not going to happen in the next couple of decades, even though they’re now the most populous country on the planet. But I think there’s more to it at the subnational level there. But again, I’m an institutionalist.

So what are the rules of the game? If you have rules of the game that allow small interest to take political power, say, for example, the type of parliamentary system where you could get 20 percent, 30 percent of the vote and come to rule in the country, then population sizes will matter in one way. They can potentially take over that governance there.

I think in the U.S., it’s more complicated because we’re still on these two parties, and we’re not getting out of these two parties anytime necessarily soon. So it is harder for a particular niche, even though they may be growing in population, to take over the whole political governing landscape.

You said at the beginning here, look, there are all these facts, and then there’s what you do with the facts. What do you do with them? We’ve talked a bit about the sort of overpopulation take. We’ve talked a bit about the decline of state. What is your orientation? When you look at societies at 1.5, 1.6 — they seemed to be dropping a little bit lower over time — how do you think about it, and how do you think about where they should be thinking about going from here?

I’m trying to strike a balance between showing how important it is to always view demographics, but not so important that you’re willing to take away people’s rights or focus solely on that number, those population numbers, to the extent that you forget to deal with the people who are there.

So, I would think, for example, if we know climate change is happening, it would be a mistake to focus only on stopping or reversing climate change. While the waters are rising and coming above your front porch, you should also probably put your house up on some stilts. We need to think, instead, about how to have resilient societies that adapt to what is there.

And knowing that I’ve already said we should pay attention to super, super low fertility rates, if we’re just hanging out at this below replacement level, but steadily, this 1.5 to 1.9 area, this is not doom and gloom. It’s only doom and gloom if you are not willing to change anything else about it.

Do you have a pay as you go entitlement system, where you need a constant influx of workers to financially support those who are exiting the workforce? Well, then, yeah, you’re right. Probably is going to be doom and gloom. So, we have to have that adaptation now. We have to have that resilience. And we are wasting time and resources in not doing that, and instead, trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

But at the same time, I do think it’s important for us to support families and children for the purpose of supporting families and children because, otherwise, what is the point of it? What is the point? I think society is made up of us as people.

And a lot of times, with these aggregate numbers we talk about, we forget that they are just an aggregate of a bunch of individual decisions. And I want to live in a society that is optimistic about the future, where there are children and older people and people of working ages. And to me, that’s really the point of it all, is to see us as humans, as valuable.

I think that is a good place to end. And always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

So I have three books that I love for different reasons. So I love “Extra Life” by Steven Johnson. It’s zooming out to say, isn’t it remarkable that we have basically added an extra life because of how much we have improved health and life expectancy?

I also love this book by Paul Sabin that I used to teach out of. And it is called “The Bet, Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future.” And what I like about it is, there was not always the case that there was this huge divide between the left and the right over environmental ideas in the US. There was a time when we were kind of united on that. And it just kind of traces that history of how we came to be divided on this issue of overpopulation that I think is a really important thing to chronicle, and it’s a really interesting book.

And then the third one, it’s more of an academic book, but if you want a history of some of the most interesting, demographic engineering that we’ve seen in the world, it’s a book called reproductive states. And it’s edited by Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi. And it’s “Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy.”

And I think it’s fascinating to look at how individual countries will have this very anti-natalist policy for decades, and then fertility will go low. And they’ll freak out, and then they will put into place pro-natalist policies, just like a flipping a switch, you know? But you can really see these interventions over time in different countries. And it’s a really fascinating view into countries like China, India, et cetera.

Jennifer Sciubba, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Thank you so much.

EZRA KLEIN: So, tell me what the total fertility rate is.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: So, the total fertility rate is — let’s just say it’s the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime. It’s a great measure because in one number, you can kind of get a snapshot to compare across time and across places.

EZRA KLEIN: So, when I listen to the conversation about total fertility rates, there are sort of two conversations right now happening at the same time. One conversation that I sometimes hear on my left — I get a lot of it in my email inbox for this show — is that it’s way too high. There are too many people. There are going to be even more people.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, you nailed it. That’s exactly what the conversation looks like. It’s like Goldilocks is in the room here with us, right? It’s either too high or it’s too low, and it’s never just right. So while we are perceiving this on the left and right in the world today, I will say that it’s, as a student of population history, it’s kind of been like that for a long time, this perception about global fertility.

EZRA KLEIN: How true is this statement? As countries get richer and more educated, their fertility rate drops.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: If we’re trying to make it a causal statement, it is somewhat true and only partially, because we have some really interesting, huge examples where that has not been the case. And let’s take India, for example. So a lot of people do not realize that India is already really below replacement level for the whole country.

EZRA KLEIN: So, but I want to pick this apart because I hear you saying two things here. One is that you have countries that have not traveled all that rapidly up the education, income scale, though India has traveled somewhat up the education, income scale. I mean, there’s been a lot of development there.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Oh, yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: But you have countries where you’ve seen a sharp fall in the fertility rate without a very sharp rise, let’s call it in median incomes. But I’m also asking a question slightly to the side of it. If a country has gotten richer, if I just tell you country A and do not name country A has gotten significantly richer, that country A is now highly educated, highly literate, it is wealthy, does that allow you to predict with a high level of certainty that country A is probably going to be low fertility rate, probably below replacement level?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: It sure does. Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you why. Because this, to me, is the slightly mysterious thing at the heart of this conversation and my interest in it, which is I know it is a demographic fact that when you look around the world, rich countries, more educated countries have fewer children. It does not seem obvious to me that’s the way it would have worked out, right?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: It sure does, and you are right that this is, in some ways, counterintuitive. Well, sure, we’ve got those rising income, rising education. We’ve also got shifting values and norms. And listen, I’m a political scientist. I’m a trained political scientist. We absolutely talk about values and norms. We also know that it’s really hard to measure some of these and it’s really hard to put them in a causal chain.

So, when I’m thinking about reflecting back on these big changes and looking at the literatures and looking at all the causality, that’s the one that I think has us where we are today. There’s been a tremendous shift in values and norms. And so, I think about my own life. So I have two children. And I have values beyond just wanting those children. Sorry to them if they listen to this. Thank goodness, they probably won’t, till they’re older.

I do value my free time. I do value a nice meal at a restaurant. I value time with friends, time with my spouse, et cetera, et cetera. I value my career. And I value time with them the most. But you know what? It does compete for time.

EZRA KLEIN: I do find it to be the case. Is a different way of saying this that as countries become richer and more educated, they become more individualistic. And when you’re more individualistic, and people are making decisions more about their life, their self-expression, their set of choices, do I want to travel, do I want to become a PhD in political science, that, then, children are one choice competing among many?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I think that is part of it. And I think it’s just even more complicated than that. And I come back all the time to reflecting on the term “family planning” because family planning, in the greatest sense of it, is, you plan and decide when you get to have children. And when you can make that choice, it becomes really difficult to decide, is now the right time? Is now the right time? Will I be in a better position to do this in five years?

EZRA KLEIN: That’s an important corrective, I think, to something buried in my individualism hypothesis, which is that, as you were saying earlier, there’s a culture here. If I had told my parents — I met my partner when we were 24.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Exactly. Uh-oh. What’d you do wrong?

EZRA KLEIN: Right? That there is a culture around you of, when do things look normal? And also, we’d have been the only ones in our friend group with kids at that point. And so, there is this way in which, yes, there’s a lot of individualism, but the individualism also has very potent cultural grooves, right? You’re supposed to go and get education, and then more education and then more education, and then establish yourself in your career and be financially in a good spot, and of course, be married.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yeah. So, for the total fertility rate for the U.S., writ large, is about 1.6 to 1.7 children per woman. So, it’s decently below replacement level there. For the more education you get, typically, the lower it is. It’s this success sequence that we talk about. OK, you’re going to raise your kids to say you’re going to get lots of education. Then you’re going to get a great job. You’re going to buy a home. You’re going to start a retirement account and get some savings and then have children. So, any little blip along that would then push that off more and more.

EZRA KLEIN: Congratulations.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yeah, thanks, right? That probably sounds absolutely nuts to a lot of your listeners. But you know what? I was the last one of my friends to get married. We were college-educated women. Getting married early looked very normal in my group. In other parts of the country — I mean, I’m from the South, I’m sure you can hear — it is pretty normal to get married.

And then you think about my neighborhood — got lots of folks with more than two children. So, what you’re surrounded by and how you kind of measure normal behavior, acceptable behavior, those cultural values and norms, they affect your decisions around dating, marriage, and having children.

EZRA KLEIN: I see this in my own world. And I am part of different communities. I’ve lived in, over the past 10 years, three different cities. My communities are typically pretty highly educated. But that has been different in different groups, too.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Maybe, but I actually think there’s a little bit more to it because the gap with highly educated and less highly educated is not that big anymore. However, it is true that the longer you stay in education, the more you kind of truncate the years in which you might have children, so you might not have that second or that third child.

EZRA KLEIN: Is this really something that amenable to policy change, though? One of the things that is most striking to me about the data here — and here, I’m zooming back out to the international context — is that across many different kinds of societies, including some that have seen this as a crisis for their country for some time — I think here of Japan, I think here of South Korea — the ability to shift this through policy — and people have tried a lot of different things and a lot of different kinds of messaging and tax incentives and this and that — it doesn’t really seem like anything has worked.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: You are absolutely right, yes. State policy is pretty effective at being able to take a high fertility society to a lower fertility one. It is generally pretty ineffective at a sustained rate. That’s why I say, this is a permanent shift for us. And so, as a researcher, we want to isolate a variable the same way that a policymaker does. If you can nail it down to the top one or two reasons why a fertility rate is low, then you could presumably put a policy in place to change that.

EZRA KLEIN: Tell me about a couple of the examples here in some depth. So, there is the, I think to many people, to me, horrifying example of Romania. That sits out there. You write about it in your book. Then there’s also — I mean, as you know, Japan has done things. South Korea has done quite a bit.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: So, a lot of people who are aiming to raise fertility rates are trying to raise them to replacement level. And the reason they’re trying to do that is because it just gives you this nice stovepiped age structure where you got a steady number of people being born, aging into the workforce and aging out, without any strains on needing to scramble to build kindergartens or scramble to pay for Social Security.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, we have a current example of this. Russia’s fertility rate is not particularly high. And one of the things Putin said often, before invading Ukraine, was that Ukraine was full of what he considered to be Russian babies, Russian people. People are, to him, power. People are understood, in many countries, to be power.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I think so, too. And I think at the end of the day, why this matters is that people look at shrinking populations, of which there are already over 30 countries that are shrinking, and low fertility as an existential issue. And so, when you elevate it to an existential issue, the question becomes, what are you willing to do to change it?

EZRA KLEIN: Let me put aside the language of existential because I think people’s minds shut down when you begin to get into whether something is an existential threat, but is low fertility a threat? I mean, I look at South Korea, I look at Japan — I think of that certainly as a significant problem for those societies. I mean, within 50 or 60 years, their population level will convulse downwards.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: If we zoom out on the whole and we look at how globally fertility rates have fallen from way high, six, seven children per woman, down to now two, this is a positive story. It’s something that we worked for, for decades.

EZRA KLEIN: I struggle a little bit with this question of pessimism and fertility. And so I’d like to open it up a little bit. I hear a lot from people who say they don’t want to have children because of climate change or because the world is chaos, and it’s been terrible here, and how can you bring a child into this?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, a little caveat to that — a lot of these places that are war torn, they don’t have contraceptives, and they are not able to actually make those choices. They don’t have full choice about their reproduction. I think it does come back to this idea about choice. And I will also say that, I mean, I’m in the same bubble you’re in. I spent 15 years in academia, for example. It’s a certain set of people who just might justify their choices based on that.

EZRA KLEIN: One other question that tracks this wealth issue is that a lot of people who are doing very well by global standards, maybe not the richest one percent of Americans or anything, but one thing you’ll hear is that it’s extraordinarily expensive to have children. And I have two children, and I’m here to confirm that it is extraordinarily expensive to have children. But of course, the people having more children are poorer.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I think that is a huge factor in why people have fewer children in the U.S. It obviously isn’t just money because we all have more money now than we did. We’re doing better. And so, you can’t just nail it down to say it’s expensive. It really is about this intensity. And some of that intensity is money. I’ve got friends with kids on travel baseball teams — oh, my goodness — a lot of money and a lot of time.

EZRA KLEIN: I just pray my kids don’t play club sports. Like, that’s the only thing I truly want as a parent, for them to not be very good at sports.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yes, mine inherited my lack of ability, so I am winning. Yes, they’re like, can we go to the library? I’m like, you bet, sweetpea. Let’s go. Because, yes, it is just that. And one of my friends, the same one, she’s a stay-at-home mom, and she says, how do people do it if they both work? And the answer is, of course, you either have some prescriptions for some anxiety medication thtat you both pop in the morning, you try to get some help, but it’s hard to get help. People don’t live near parents who can help them, et cetera. It is just such tremendously intensive parenting. And that is the culture now.

EZRA KLEIN: I think a lot about this particular question because I’m so caught on it. Because on the one hand, I get the all joy, no fun theory here. And I don’t find it to be true exactly. I find there to be a lot of fun in it, but I’m also somebody with a pretty flexible job. I work a lot, but I have a fair amount of control over those hours. And I’m somebody with enough money to fill in some of the gaps that we need to fill in. So, we can go out occasionally, that kind of thing.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yes, and we have some data on this. The one that always strikes me is that a working mother today spends more time with her child than a stay-at-home mom would have a few decades ago. We’re spending more time with our kids on average. So I absolutely think that’s the case. And I do think it matters.

EZRA KLEIN: Something that has come up a few times here is simply that women work now. And nobody wants to go back on that, or at least, I don’t want to go back on that. But how much is that just an explanatory factor, that this idea that you’re going to have high fertility in societies where you have dual income, full-time working parents, but also there’s nobody else to take care of the kids, that that just doesn’t fit. I mean, you can say whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. You can have your tax incentives, whatever. But if you’ve got two parents working, it’s just pretty tough, particularly if they’re not making millions of dollars at their jobs.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: And it’s extra tough when you don’t have a community that supports you. And I think that may be one of the biggest differences now, is that if I think about — I work a highly flexible job. My husband works a less flexible job. So we have a two-income family. But anything I need for support, I’m basically hiring out. I mean, there’s spreadsheets for if I have a work trip. OK, this one’s coming on this day. This one can’t drive. So this one has to do this, that, and the other.

EZRA KLEIN: And I wonder, too, not just about the parents, but the other kids. I mean, I didn’t grow up in the long, long days ago. It still feels fairly recent to me. But I did grow up at a time — I grew up in suburban California. There are kids in almost every house on our block, and they all played outside. And they all just kind of ran around as a pack. And there were younger ones and older ones and everybody played kickball on the garages.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yes, and I do think that makes a difference. I really do. My husband grew up in upstate New York, and he talks all the time about how he and his friends, guys in the neighborhood who were his same age in school and some a little bit older, would get on their bikes, they’d go into the woods, they’d be gone all day long, and nobody thought anything about it. And if one of our sons wants to go over to his friend’s house and he wants to ride his bike, we’re terrified to let him.

Now, part of this is where I live. Statistically, maybe you should be a little bit terrified to let him go, but probably don’t need to be quite as terrified as I am now. But there’s a sense that what if something happened? I would never forgive myself. What will other parents think if I just let my child go out because — and cross a major road. It really is a different intensity to parenting.

I did not grow up in a neighborhood. I grew up in the countryside, and I grew up as an only child. But I was completely independent, and my mom wasn’t saying, OK, you have now played with that litter of puppies for too long. Perhaps you should come inside and eat a snack, or just really micromanaging my life there. And I totally am doing this to my kids. I try not to. I get that I shouldn’t.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, to add numbers to that, I think the United States, you mentioned earlier, the fertility rate is about 1.6 — any of these surveys showing that Americans would like to have, on average, 2.7 kids. So, there’s this question of people who don’t want to have kids that gets a lot of attention, but there’s also this question of people who would like to have more children than they do.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Yes, and there’s all kinds of little things about this. And we did have two. And we talked about if you had a third, where does the car seat go? We would have to get different cars to be able to fit a third car seat because our kids were close together. I have an 11-year-old son who is not a small guy. He’s a tall guy, 90th percentile. He’s still sitting in the back seat. He’s not supposed to sit in the front seat yet of the car. And that means that only one of you can have a friend come play today if we’re going to drive you anywhere.

EZRA KLEIN: Is that a way that low fertility rates end up feeding on themselves? I lived in San Francisco, which is notoriously a quite low fertility rate major American city. And you could just feel it. You could just feel that there was not infrastructure, really, for kids. I mean, there were some playgrounds, but nothing opened early. But kids get up early. And it’s all these little things that just make it a little bit harder.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: And I think what’s remarkable about this is that there’s such a divide between rhetoric and action on this. So, in the U.S., the conversation is starting to trend toward, OK, we are a low fertility society. Uh-oh, how do we change that? That’s the rhetoric, but the question we need to ask about the action, then, is, are we really a society that values children and families? And I think in a lot of cases, the answer really is no.

EZRA KLEIN: I was going to ask you about religion as an independent variable here. How much is religion a force that is capable of changing fertility rates? And on the flip side of that, how much is secularization a driver of pushing them down? Are there, in fact, any secular societies or large secular groups that have high fertility rates?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, I think generally speaking, religiosity matters. It’s about how religious are you, which we think about, how often do you go to services or pray, et cetera. For example, Mormons in the United States have a higher total fertility rate than those who are not religious at all, have low degrees of religiosity. And we tend to see that around the world. Secularism? Yeah, we do see lower rates there. And since we know that religiosity itself is declining, we would expect that to be a pressure towards lower.

EZRA KLEIN: Behind both of those worldviews is not just values, although values are probably there, but also an instrumental sense of what will happen in different scenarios. So the overpopulation folks, they’re worried about the human load on the planet. More humans is, to a first approximation, more carbon dioxide, more material usage, more humans taking up habitat, eating livestock, or raised on arable land, et cetera, et cetera.

Then, there’s the other side, right, the people on the right. And there are people who just believe children are an intrinsic good, that either it is a religious duty or just a beautiful thing, right? More souls in the world, more human beings who can have important, meaningful human experiences. But there’s also a view that sharp demographic decline is a catastrophe from a power and social stability perspective.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I think that arguments like that suffer from a significant failure of imagination because what they’re basically saying is that you either grow infinitely, or you collapse. And there is nothing in between. And I think there’s a lot in between. We just love to be alarmist about population. We’re alarmist about it being too high in the ’60s. We’re alarmist about it being too low today.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the other — I don’t know whether to call this a concern or prediction — maybe both — is that you’re just going to see a huge shift in world power as population rates change. So, places with more population are, over time, going to become more powerful. Places with less are going to become less powerful. I think certainly at extreme levels, that is true, right? South Korea is falling by half generation after generation, or more than half. I do think it is going to see its power and sway reduced, and I think it is going to be in more danger from neighbors.

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I think it’s a very different answer depending on if we’re at the global level or a subnational level. So, if we’re at the global level, does population equal power? Nah. You know why? Because the rules of the game are already written. So, I tend to be an institutionalist in political science terms, meaning I think a lot about the power of the structures, the power of the rules of the game.

EZRA KLEIN: You said at the beginning here, look, there are all these facts, and then there’s what you do with the facts. What do you do with them? We’ve talked a bit about the sort of overpopulation take. We’ve talked a bit about the decline of state. What is your orientation? When you look at societies at 1.5, 1.6 — they seemed to be dropping a little bit lower over time — how do you think about it, and how do you think about where they should be thinking about going from here?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: I’m trying to strike a balance between showing how important it is to always view demographics, but not so important that you’re willing to take away people’s rights or focus solely on that number, those population numbers, to the extent that you forget to deal with the people who are there.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that is a good place to end. And always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

JENNIFER SCIUBBA: So I have three books that I love for different reasons. So I love “Extra Life” by Steven Johnson. It’s zooming out to say, isn’t it remarkable that we have basically added an extra life because of how much we have improved health and life expectancy?

EZRA KLEIN: Jennifer Sciubba, thank you very much.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Advertisement

The Philippines economy in 2024: Stronger for longer?

The Philippines ended 2023 on a high note, being the fastest growing economy across Southeast Asia with a growth rate of 5.6 percent—just shy of the government's target of 6.0 to 7.0 percent. 1 “National accounts,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 31, 2024; "Philippine economic updates,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, November 16, 2023. Should projections hold, the Philippines is expected to, once again, show significant growth in 2024, demonstrating its resilience despite various global economic pressures (Exhibit 1). 2 “Economic forecast 2024,” International Monetary Fund, November 1, 2023; McKinsey analysis.

The growth in the Philippine economy in 2023 was driven by a resumption in commercial activities, public infrastructure spending, and growth in digital financial services. Most sectors grew, with transportation and storage (13 percent), construction (9 percent), and financial services (9 percent), performing the best (Exhibit 2). 3 “National accounts,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 31, 2024. While the country's trade deficit narrowed in 2023, it remains elevated at $52 billion due to slowing global demand and geopolitical uncertainties. 4 “Highlights of the Philippine export and import statistics,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 28, 2024. Looking ahead to 2024, the current economic forecast for the Philippines projects a GDP growth of between 5 and 6 percent.

Inflation rates are expected to temper between 3.2 and 3.6 percent in 2024 after ending 2023 at 6.0 percent, above the 2.0 to 4.0 percent target range set by the government. 5 “Nomura downgrades Philippine 2024 growth forecast,” Nomura, September 11, 2023; “IMF raises Philippine growth rate forecast,” International Monetary Fund, July 16, 2023.

For the purposes of this article, most of the statistics used for our analysis have come from a common thread of sources. These include the Central Bank of the Philippines (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas); the Department of Energy Philippines; the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP); and the Philippines Statistics Authority.

The state of the Philippine economy across seven major sectors and themes

In the article, we explore the 2024 outlook for seven key sectors and themes, what may affect each of them in the coming year, and what could potentially unlock continued growth.

Financial services

The recovery of the financial services sector appears on track as year-on-year growth rates stabilize. 6 Philippines Statistics Authority, November 2023; McKinsey in partnership with Oxford Economics, November 2023. In 2024, this sector will likely continue to grow, though at a slower pace of about 5 percent.

Financial inclusion and digitalization are contributing to growth in this sector in 2024, even if new challenges emerge. Various factors are expected to impact this sector:

  • Inclusive finance: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas continues to invest in financial inclusion initiatives. For example, basic deposit accounts (BDAs) reached $22 million in 2023 and banking penetration improved, with the proportion of adults with formal bank accounts increasing from 29 percent in 2019 to 56 percent in 2021. 7 “Financial inclusion dashboard: First quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024.
  • Digital adoption: Digital channels are expected to continue to grow, with data showing that 60 percent of adults who have a mobile phone and internet access have done a digital financial transaction. 8 “Financial inclusion dashboard: First quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024. Businesses in this sector, however, will need to remain vigilant in navigating cybersecurity and fraud risks.
  • Unsecured lending growth: Growth in unsecured lending is expected to continue, but at a slower pace than the past two to three years. For example, unsecured retail lending for the banking system alone grew by 27 percent annually from 2020 to 2022. 9 “Loan accounts: As of first quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024; "Global banking pools,” McKinsey, November 2023. Businesses in this field are, however, expected to recalibrate their risk profiling models as segments with high nonperforming loans emerge.
  • High interest rates: Key interest rates are expected to decline in the second half of 2024, creating more accommodating borrowing conditions that could boost wholesale and corporate loans.

Supportive frameworks have a pivotal role to play in unlocking growth in this sector to meet the ever-increasing demand from the financially underserved. For example, financial literacy programs and easier-to-access accounts—such as BDAs—are some measures that can help widen market access to financial services. Continued efforts are being made to build an open finance framework that could serve the needs of the unbanked population, as well as a unified credit scoring mechanism to increase the ability of historically under-financed segments, such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to access formal credit. 10 “BSP launches credit scoring model,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, April 26, 2023.

Energy and Power

The outlook for the energy sector seems positive, with the potential to grow by 7 percent in 2024 as the country focuses on renewable energy generation. 11 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts. Currently, stakeholders are focused on increasing energy security, particularly on importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet power plants’ requirements as production in one of the country’s main sources of natural gas, the Malampaya gas field, declines. 12 Myrna M. Velasco, “Malampaya gas field prod’n declines steeply in 2021,” Manila Bulletin , July 9, 2022. High global inflation and the fact that the Philippines is a net fuel importer are impacting electricity prices and the build-out of planned renewable energy projects. Recent regulatory moves to remove foreign ownership limits on exploration, development, and utilization of renewable energy resources could possibly accelerate growth in the country’s energy and power sector. 13 “RA 11659,” Department of Energy Philippines, June 8, 2023.

Gas, renewables, and transmission are potential growth drivers for the sector. Upgrading power grids so that they become more flexible and better able to cope with the intermittent electricity supply that comes with renewables will be critical as the sector pivots toward renewable energy. A recent coal moratorium may position natural gas as a transition fuel—this could stimulate exploration and production investments for new, indigenous natural gas fields, gas pipeline infrastructure, and LNG import terminal projects. 14 Philippine energy plan 2020–2040, Department of Energy Philippines, June 10, 2022; Power development plan 2020–2040 , Department of Energy Philippines, 2021. The increasing momentum of green energy auctions could facilitate the development of renewables at scale, as the country targets 35 percent share of renewables by 2030. 15 Power development plan 2020–2040 , 2022.

Growth in the healthcare industry may slow to 2.8 percent in 2024, while pharmaceuticals manufacturing is expected to rebound with 5.2 percent growth in 2024. 16 McKinsey analysis in partnership with Oxford Economics.

Healthcare demand could grow, although the quality of care may be strained as the health worker shortage is projected to increase over the next five years. 17 McKinsey analysis. The supply-and-demand gap in nursing alone is forecast to reach a shortage of approximately 90,000 nurses by 2028. 18 McKinsey analysis. Another compounding factor straining healthcare is the higher than anticipated benefit utilization and rising healthcare costs, which, while helping to meet people's healthcare budgets, may continue to drive down profitability for health insurers.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are feeling varying effects of people becoming increasingly health conscious. Consumers are using more over the counter (OTC) medication and placing more beneficial value on organic health products, such as vitamins and supplements made from natural ingredients, which could impact demand for prescription drugs. 19 “Consumer health in the Philippines 2023,” Euromonitor, October 2023.

Businesses operating in this field may end up benefiting from universal healthcare policies. If initiatives are implemented that integrate healthcare systems, rationalize copayments, attract and retain talent, and incentivize investments, they could potentially help to strengthen healthcare provision and quality.

Businesses may also need to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of diverse health needs, digitization, and price controls. Digital and data transformations are being seen to facilitate improvements in healthcare delivery and access, with leading digital health apps getting more than one million downloads. 20 Google Play Store, September 27, 2023. Digitization may create an opportunity to develop healthcare ecosystems that unify touchpoints along the patient journey and provide offline-to-online care, as well as potentially realizing cost efficiencies.

Consumer and retail

Growth in the retail and wholesale trade and consumer goods sectors is projected to remain stable in 2024, at 4 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

Inflation, however, continues to put consumers under pressure. While inflation rates may fall—predicted to reach 4 percent in 2024—commodity prices may still remain elevated in the near term, a top concern for Filipinos. 21 “IMF raises Philippine growth forecast,” July 26, 2023; “Nomura downgrades Philippines 2024 growth forecast,” September 11, 2023. In response to challenging economic conditions, 92 percent of consumers have changed their shopping behaviors, and approximately 50 percent indicate that they are switching brands or retail providers in seek of promotions and better prices. 22 “Philippines consumer pulse survey, 2023,” McKinsey, November 2023.

Online shopping has become entrenched in Filipino consumers, as they find that they get access to a wider range of products, can compare prices more easily, and can shop with more convenience. For example, a McKinsey Philippines consumer sentiment survey in 2023 found that 80 percent of respondents, on average, use online and omnichannel to purchase footwear, toys, baby supplies, apparel, and accessories. To capture the opportunity that this shift in Filipino consumer preferences brings and to unlock growth in this sector, retail organizations could turn to omnichannel strategies to seamlessly integrate online and offline channels. Businesses may need to explore investments that increase resilience across the supply chain, alongside researching and developing new products that serve emerging consumer preferences, such as that for natural ingredients and sustainable sources.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is a key contributor to the Philippine economy, contributing approximately 19 percent of GDP in 2022, employing about 7 percent of the country’s labor force, and growing in line with GDP at approximately 6 percent between 2023 and 2024. 23 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.

Some changes could be seen in 2024 that might affect the sector moving forward. The focus toward building resilient supply chains and increasing self-sufficiency is growing. The Philippines also is likely to benefit from increasing regional trade, as well as the emerging trend of nearshoring or onshoring as countries seek to make their supply chains more resilient. With semiconductors driving approximately 45 percent of Philippine exports, the transfer of knowledge and technology, as well as the development of STEM capabilities, could help attract investments into the sector and increase the relevance of the country as a manufacturing hub. 24 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.

To secure growth, public and private sector support could bolster investments in R&D and upskill the labor force. In addition, strategies to attract investment may be integral to the further development of supply chain infrastructure and manufacturing bases. Government programs to enable digital transformation and R&D, along with a strategic approach to upskilling the labor force, could help boost industry innovation in line with Industry 4.0 demand. 25 Industry 4.0 is also referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Priority products to which manufacturing industries could pivot include more complex, higher value chain electronic components in the semiconductor segment; generic OTC drugs and nature-based pharmaceuticals in the pharmaceutical sector; and, for green industries, products such as EVs, batteries, solar panels, and biomass production.

Information technology business process outsourcing

The information technology business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) sector is on track to reach its long-term targets, with $38 billion in forecast revenues in 2024. 26 Khriscielle Yalao, “WHF flexibility key to achieving growth targets—IBPAP,” Manila Bulletin , January 23, 2024. Emerging innovations in service delivery and work models are being observed, which could drive further growth in the sector.

The industry continues to outperform headcount and revenue targets, shaping its position as a country leader for employment and services. 27 McKinsey analysis based in input from industry experts. Demand from global companies for offshoring is expected to increase, due to cost containment strategies and preference for Philippine IT-BPO providers. New work setups continue to emerge, ranging from remote-first to office-first, which could translate to potential net benefits. These include a 10 to 30 percent increase in employee retention; a three- to four-hour reduction in commute times; an increase in enabled talent of 350,000; and a potential reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 1.4 to 1.5 million tons of CO 2 per year. 28 McKinsey analysis based in input from industry experts. It is becoming increasingly more important that the IT-BPO sector adapts to new technologies as businesses begin to harness automation and generative AI (gen AI) to unlock productivity.

Talent and technology are clear areas where growth in this sector can be unlocked. The growing complexity of offshoring requirements necessitates building a proper talent hub to help bridge employee gaps and better match local talent to employers’ needs. Businesses in the industry could explore developing facilities and digital infrastructure to enable industry expansion outside the metros, especially in future “digital cities” nationwide. Introducing new service areas could capture latent demand from existing clients with evolving needs as well as unserved clients. BPO centers could explore the potential of offering higher-value services by cultivating technology-focused capabilities, such as using gen AI to unlock revenue, deliver sales excellence, and reduce general administrative costs.

Sustainability

The Philippines is considered to be the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change in the world as, due to its geographic location, the country has a higher risk of exposure to natural disasters, such as rising sea levels. 29 “The Philippines has been ranked the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change,” Global Climate Risk Index, January 2021. Approximately $3.2 billion, on average, in economic loss could occur annually because of natural disasters over the next five decades, translating to up to 7 to 8 percent of the country’s nominal GDP. 30 “The Philippines has been ranked the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change,” Global Climate Risk Index, January 2021.

The Philippines could capitalize on five green growth opportunities to operate in global value chains and catalyze growth for the nation:

  • Renewable energy: The country could aim to generate 50 percent of its energy from renewables by 2040, building on its high renewable energy potential and the declining cost of producing renewable energy.
  • Solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing: More than a twofold increase in annual output from 2023 to 2030 could be achieved, enabled by lower production costs.
  • Battery production: The Philippines could aim for a $1.5 billion domestic market by 2030, capitalizing on its vast nickel reserves (the second largest globally). 31 “MineSpans,” McKinsey, November 2023.
  • Electric mobility: Electric vehicles could account for 15 percent of the country’s vehicle sales by 2030 (from less than 1 percent currently), driven by incentives, local distribution, and charging infrastructure. 32 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.
  • Nature-based solutions: The country’s largely untapped total abatement potential could reach up to 200 to 300 metric tons of CO 2 , enabled by its biodiversity and strong demand.

The Philippine economy: Three scenarios for growth

Having grown faster than other economies in Southeast Asia in 2023 to end the year with 5.6 percent growth, the Philippines can expect a similarly healthy growth outlook for 2024. Based on our analysis, there are three potential scenarios for the country’s growth. 33 McKinsey analysis in partnership with Oxford Economics.

Slower growth: The first scenario projects GDP growth of 4.8 percent if there are challenging conditions—such as declining trade and accelerated inflation—which could keep key policy rates high at about 6.5 percent and dampen private consumption, leading to slower long-term growth.

Soft landing: The second scenario projects GDP growth of 5.2 percent if inflation moderates and global conditions turn out to be largely favorable due to a stable investment environment and regional trade demand.

Accelerated growth: In the third scenario, GDP growth is projected to reach 6.1 percent if inflation slows and public policies accommodate aspects such as loosening key policy rates and offering incentive programs to boost productivity.

Focusing on factors that could unlock growth in its seven critical sectors and themes, while adapting to the macro-economic scenario that plays out, would allow the Philippines to materialize its growth potential in 2024 and take steps towards achieving longer-term, sustainable economic growth.

Jon Canto is a partner in McKinsey’s Manila office, where Frauke Renz is an associate partner, and Vicah Villanueva is a consultant.

The authors wish to thank Charlene Chua, Charlie del Rosario, Ryan delos Reyes, Debadrita Dhara, Evelyn C. Fong, Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, Frances Lee, Aaron Ong, and Liane Tan for their contributions to this article.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

Philippines Growth Dialogues

The Philippines Growth Dialogues

plane flying over Philippines - line drawing

What does 2023 hold for the Philippines’ economy?

Close-up of woman's hand typing on a smartphone in the city in front of cars at beautiful sunset

On the verge of a digital banking revolution in the Philippines

IMAGES

  1. Effect of peer pressure on students Essay Example

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

  2. Peer Pressure Dynamics: Navigating Influences on Teen Behavior Free

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

  3. Handling the effects of peer pressure

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

  4. Sample Peer Pressure Essay

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

  5. ≫ Positive and Negative Peer Pressure Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

  6. 💌 Effects of peer pressure essay. Free Essay: Effects of Peer Pressure

    peer pressure is beneficial essay

VIDEO

  1. Alcoholic Peer Pressure at Dinner

  2. When Peer Pressure Works In Your Favor @tradesbysci

  3. PEER PRESSURE

COMMENTS

  1. Peer Pressure Essay for Students and Children

    500+ Words Essay on Peer Pressure. Peer pressure can be both negative and positive. Because if a person is a peer pressuring you for a good cause then it is motivation. Motivation is essential for the growth of a person. While peer pressure for a bad cause will always lead you to a disastrous situation. Therefore it necessary for a person to ...

  2. Essay on Peer Pressure: 100, 200, and 450 Word Samples in English

    Essay on Peer Pressure in 100 Words. 'Peer pressure refers to the influence of your peers. Peer pressure either be of positive or negative types. Positive peer pressure can encourage healthy habits like academic challenges, physical activities, or engaging in positive social activities. Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, can lead us ...

  3. Peer Pressure: Positive and Negative Effects Essay

    The effects of peer pressure depend on the nature of the influencing group. A bad group may influence an individual in a wrong way, while a good group may instill in a person positive values. Examples of negative peer influence include making wrong decisions, loss of identity, and development of bad habits, while positive peer influence ...

  4. Essay on Peer Pressure for Students in English [500+ Words]

    Essay on Peer Pressure: ... Positive peer pressure is beneficial and healthy, but it is the negative side of it, that can prove to be harmful. School children and teenagers are more prone to peer pressure. This is the age where they indulge themselves in alcohol, smoking, drugs, ragging, beating up others, stealing and what not! ...

  5. 84 Peer Pressure Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

    Peer Pressure as One of the Main Teenagers Problem. The introduction of a healthy social and psychological environment in schools is a program that will be implemented to help curb negative effects of peer pressure. We will write. a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts. 809 writers online.

  6. Peer Pressure: Definition, Types, Examples, and Ways to Cope

    Peer pressure is the way people of the same social group can influence one another. There may be negative or positive effects of peer pressure. Learn more. ... That way, you're fulfilling both of your needs in a mutually beneficial way. 10 Sources. Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the ...

  7. The good and bad of peer pressure, with Brett Laursen, PhD

    Brett Laursen is a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, where his research focuses on how children and teens interact with their peers and parents. Specifically, he studies how these relationships affect their social lives and academics. Dr. Laursen is a fellow of the American Psychological Association.

  8. Peer Pressure: Essay, Types, Factors, Strategies & Solutions

    Types of Peer Pressure. Let's delve into the various types of peer pressure: 1. Direct Peer Pressure. Direct peer pressure involves explicit attempts by individuals to influence others to conform to specific behaviors, choices, or actions. This can manifest through direct persuasion, encouragement, or even coercion.

  9. Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance

    We will write a custom essay on your topic. One of the most popular types of peer pressure is forcing someone to smoke or use alcohol or drugs (MacArthur et al. 392). It is a widespread situation when a teenager starts to practice unhealthy behavior under the pressure of peers of their group. For example, let us imagine Jack, who is forced to ...

  10. Peer Pressure Essay

    Peer Pressure Essay. Peer Pressure Peer pressure is defined by Merriam-Webster as a feeling that one must do the same thing as other people of one's age and social group in order to be liked or respected by them. Peer pressure can have a potentially positive or negative effect, or it can be both.

  11. IELTS Essay: Peer Pressure

    Analysis. 1. Peer pressure refers to the influence young individuals experience within the same age group, affecting their behaviors. 2. This essay will critically evaluate the drawbacks and benefits of peer pressure on young people. Paraphrase the overall essay topic. Write a clear opinion.

  12. Positive Peer Pressure: a Friend Within Friends

    Positive peer pressure can lead to the adoption of beneficial habits, replacing detrimental ones and promoting a healthier, more balanced lifestyle. Lastly, friends and peer pressure can expose individuals to new experiences and help them discover their true interests and identity. While the pressure to conform can be daunting, it can also push ...

  13. The Effects of Peer Pressure on Students, Essay Example

    Some activities driven by peer pressure can help students get involved. Activities and functions can be great for the social development of a student. Peer pressure, even when applied outside of one's comfort zone, can ultimately be beneficial. Peer pressure can also help individuals make the right choices.

  14. Peer pressure is good for self-development.

    Conclusion. Peer pressure has its pros and its cons, but on the whole, it may help a person develop both emotionally and socially. Positive peer pressure may have negative effects, but the outcome is often a positive one. On the other hand, if a person is able to experience negative peer pressure and fight it, then it may have a dramatic effect ...

  15. Argumentative Essay On Peer Pressure

    Argumentative Essay On Peer Pressure. 1446 Words6 Pages. Peer pressure is quite the controversial matter today. It is the feeling that someone your own age is pushing you toward making a certain choices, good or bad. (The Cool Spot). The level of peer influence generally increases as children grow and it has become an important influence on ...

  16. Positive Side of Peer Pressure: Shaping You for the Better

    Peer pressure can even start at kindergarten; Conclusion: I know peer pressure can also be harmful, but many people don't realize how beneficial it can be. When people hear the words "Peer Pressure" usually the first thing they think is peer pressure involving drugs, and that can happen too, but there are many ways of good peer pressure.

  17. Essay on Peer Pressure Good or Bad

    Essay on Peer Pressure Good or Bad. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. Stress is a feeling of emotion or physical tension. It can be caused by something out of the normal in someone's life. The main causes of stress are tests ...

  18. Good and Bad Peer Pressure

    Get 3-Essay Package. Bad peer pressure is being coerced into doing something that you didn't want to do because your friends said that you should. Friends have a tendency to think that they know what is best for you. They always offer their opinion whether it is wanted or not.

  19. The Influence of Social Pressure: [Essay Example], 514 words

    Social pressure is a powerful force that can influence individuals' thoughts, behaviors, and decisions. Whether it is conformity to societal norms, peer pressure, or the desire to fit in with a particular group, social pressure can shape the way individuals interact with others and navigate the world around them.It is important for individuals to be aware of the influence of social pressure ...

  20. Peer Pressure Argumentative Essay

    2. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. Cite This Essay. Download. As a result of the increased popularity of social media, the younger generation faces constant peer pressure. When I scroll through social media, I see many models, what ...

  21. Peer Pressure: a Friend Within Friends

    Despite popular belief, peer pressure is, in reality, beneficial to individuals, for the social skills one gains, the positive loop of motivation of peer pressure, and exposure to new experiences. AI-Written & Human-Edited Essay for only $7 per page!

  22. Peer Pressure in Youngsters Essay

    Long Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10. In the social and emotional development of youngsters, peers play a huge role. Their influence starts at an early stage and increases throughout their teenage years. A child needs to have an honest and healthy relationship with their friends and rely on them ...

  23. Speech On Peer Pressure [1,2,3 Minutes]

    Some people consider it to be helpful while others believe peer pressure is not always beneficial. Hence, It has become an important issue to discuss and find out the advantages and disadvantages of peer pressure. ... Essay on English Language [Short & Long] Importance Of Time Management Speech [1,2,3 Minutes] Essay On Summer Vacation In 150 ...

  24. Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Jennifer Sciubba

    Maybe the amount of pressure we're putting on ourselves — is my kid reading early enough, are we spending enough time together, are the weekends enriching enough — my whole weekend is ...

  25. The Philippines economy in 2024

    The Philippines ended 2023 on a high note, being the fastest growing economy across Southeast Asia with a growth rate of 5.6 percent—just shy of the government's target of 6.0 to 7.0 percent. 1 "National accounts," Philippine Statistics Authority, January 31, 2024; "Philippine economic updates," Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, November 16, 2023. ...