Parents in Norway are entitled to 12 months of shared paid leave for the birth of their child and an additional year each afterwards.
Known for its trailblazing ‘Nordic model’ of generous parental perks, Norway now faces a return of low fertility.
Norway’s generous parental leave, heavily subsidized childcare, and high living standards have earned it a reputation as one of the best places in the world to have children. And yet fewer than ever are being born in the Nordic country.
Although falling birthrates are a global trend, such is the concern in Oslo that the government has commissioned a birthrate committee to investigate the causes and possible consequences and devise strategies to reverse the population’s current trajectory.
Over the last two decades, Norway’s fertility rate plummeted from 1.98 children for each woman in 2009 to 1.40 in 2023, a historic low. This is despite a parental leave policy that entitles parents to 12 months of shared paid leave for the birth, plus an additional year each afterwards.
If current fertility trends continue, the sparsely populated country of nearly 5.5 million people could face wide-ranging consequences ranging from problems caring for the elderly to a reduced labor force.
Factors contributing to the decline include housing costs, postponing having children until one’s 30s, fewer people having more than two children, and an increase in those not having children at all.
“It is uncertain what the cohort fertility of the younger generations will be, but the trend is downward,” said the Norwegian minister for children and families, Lene Vågslid. “Norway is among the countries where birthrates have dropped the most over the past 10 to 15 years,” she said.
As well as leading to “long-term societal changes,” low birthrates could, she said, “eventually weaken the social model and the intergenerational contract.”
The birthrate committee’s chair, Rannveig Kaldager Hart, said there had been a “tempo shift” among Norwegians in their 20s and 30s, leading to a fall in overall births.
“There is a really marked fall among young adults in their 20s, both in their early and their late 20s,” she said from her office at the University of Oslo. “And then there was a long-term increase [in births] among adults in their 30s, but now that has stalled or even reversed.”
Kaldager Hart, an associate professor at the university’s department of health economics and health management and a fertility researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said the changes among both age groups were important.
“If you just look at the baseline, it’s very easy to just focus on the 20s picture,” Kaldager Hart said. “If Norwegians have a child, they often have one more. But then there also used to be a fair share that had three kids, and that’s become less common.” A lack of time and more women working full-time are both factors, but another is the rise of “intensive parenting.”
This is a shift away from informal, family-based responsibility for raising children, where parents followed their intuition, to a more child-centered, expert-informed approach, where parents pour in more time, emotion, and financial investment to ensure the success of their children, for which they feel personally responsible.
“If you want to follow each child very closely and take them to their activities and all these things that you’re supposed to do, then maybe it’s just easier to have two children than to have three,” said Kaldager Hart.
Raquel Herrero-Arias, an associate professor specializing in parenting at the University of Bergen, said there had been “a clear intensification of parenting” in recent years. “Raising children has become more demanding, more complex, and more expansive, involving tasks and responsibilities that were not traditionally associated with the parental role.”
Intensive parenting, she added, “promotes the idea of parental determinism—that parents are the primary architects of their children’s future”—rather” than structural issues such as poverty, employment, discrimination, or housing.
Despite Norway’s family-friendly policies, this cultural expectation could make parenthood seem less appealing.
