Basil Jarrett | Our birth rate isn’t the problem. Our boys are

I have written extensively in these pages about the existential threat that we face as a country, if our birth rate continues to plummet the way it has in recent years. So when I saw last week’s Planning Institute of Jamaica’s (PIOJ) headline warning that Jamaica’s population is about to collapse, I sat up to pay attention.

According to the institute, not only are we having fewer babies, but the majority of women leaving Jamaica as part of the country’s brain drain phenomenon, are those of childbearing age.

This has caused me to ask some very uncomfortable questions about the kind of country we’re building when our women are fleeing in droves for greener pastures on distant shores, and our men are failing to provide the kind of quality mate that might help convince them to stay.

Because if we’re being honest, the issue isn’t just about the low birth rate. It’s also about low expectations for our boys and our men. And until we start addressing that problem, we won’t fix the wider fertility problem. Let me explain.

CHOOSING NOT TO MARRY

Last week, I came across a troubling piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “American Women Have Never Been This Resigned to Staying Single”. It laid out how more and more women in the US are opting out of marriage altogether. Not because they hate men or don’t want companionship, but because, frankly, the quality of their options is declining. They’re outpacing men in education, homeownership, and income, and they’re tired of waiting for men to catch up. So they’re moving on, focusing on their careers, friendships and wellness. Sounds familiar?

The US may be slowly admitting to and accepting this fact, but here in Jamaica, we’ve been living the reality for years.

You see, it’s no coincidence that our top-performing schools are predominantly girls’ schools. Nor is it accidental that girls outperform boys in CSEC and CAPE or that our university campuses today look like all-girls institutions.

It’s also not by happenstance that fewer Jamaican men are showing up where they need to be, in school, in work, in fatherhood or in ambition.

SOUNDING THE ALARM

And that’s why, first the Statistical Institute (STATIN) and now the PIOJ have sounded alarm bells warning that Jamaica’s fertility rate has dropped from 4.5 births per woman in the 1970s to just 1.9 in 2021, well below the replacement level. But it’s not that our women can’t have babies. It’s just that fewer of them are choosing to. And if the only eligible men around are jobless, directionless, or worse, violent, then who can blame them?

In other words, let’s stop pretending that this is just about the price of diapers, infant formula or a “lifestyle choice.” It’s about our daughters taking a good, hard look at the available pool and saying,“Sorry, we’ll pass.”

But it gets worse.

MARRYING DOWN

A second article from The Atlantic painted a picture of what sociologists are now calling “hypogamous marriages”, where women are increasingly marrying men who are less educated than they are. Not because they prefer it, mind you, but because that’s all that’s left. As one female colleague bluntly put it, “These women aren’t marrying down by choice. They’re marrying what’s available.” I dared not challenge her.

But that availability gap is widening in Jamaica too. The 2023 Jamaica National Crime Victimisation Survey (JNCVS) data shows that young men aged 18 - 24 have the lowest labour force participation in the country and the highest unemployment rates. Nearly two-thirds of all murder offenders are boys in this same age group. These are not the men you build families with. These are the men from whom you flee. Or call the police on.

But I believe that the problem can be solved. It won’t be quick and it certainly won’t be easy. But it starts with investing in our boys, not just as a way to reduce crime, but as a deliberate national strategy to rescue our future population. Because make no mistake, the population crisis is a male crisis. Fix the boys, and you fix the family. Fix the family, and you stabilise the population. Simple.

THE SOLUTION

To start, we should be seriously looking to re-engineer our education system. As the JNCVS report showed, while 97.8 per cent of Jamaican students complete primary school, only 28.7 per cent pass five or more subjects at CSEC, including Math and English. Most of those passers are girls. Boys are being left behind, either because they’re bored, discouraged, undiagnosed, or underserved. They need male teachers, vocational tracks, mentorship, purpose, and early intervention.

Next, we must rethink our economic model. If we’re losing 60 per cent of our tertiary-trained citizens to foreign migration, most of them women by the way, we need to find a way to keep our men engaged and employed right here. Give them skills that are in demand. Support business ventures. Stop glorifying fast money and flashy lifestyles and start rewarding productivity and persistence. Easier said than done, right?

Absolutely, but to do so, we need a cultural reset. Jamaican masculinity must be redefined, not by machismo or misogyny mind you, but by simply being deliberate about training our boys and young men about what it means to be a real man. One that has purpose, resilience, responsibility, and relevance.

As a country, we cannot continue to export our women, imprison our men, and then wonder why we’re not making babies. We can’t keep acting as if this is a fertility clinic issue when it’s actually a masculinity one. In no way am I saying that women should settle for less or that their success is the problem. Quite the opposite actually. Our girls are thriving. They’ve stepped up. We just need to now make sure that our boys don’t decide to sit this generation out.

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