SACRAMENTO -- California's birth rate tumbled last year to its lowest point since the Great Depression, new state figures show, in yet another indication that the difficult economy is reshaping everyday life.
California families are looking at their personal finances, their job security, their prospects for the future — and increasingly deciding now is not the time to have a baby.
Marriages are down, foreclosures are up, job openings are scarce, and kids are expensive. The average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is about $225,000, federal data show.
"A lot of the people I see say, 'One (child) is enough: It's all I can afford,' " said Anna Peak, owner of Babies & Beyond, a children's store in the Land Park section of Sacramento.
Other, more permanent changes are taking place across California. The children of immigrants are having fewer children than their parents did. The population as a whole is getting older. Couples are waiting longer to start families.
Because of those patterns, the state will see strikingly low birth rates for the rest of the decade, said John Malson, acting chief of the state finance department's demographic research unit.
Last year for the first time, California women gave birth at a rate that, over their lifetime, would produce fewer than two births apiece, Malson said. In other words, California isn't producing enough children to replace its parents.
Total births will increase slightly beginning this year, but only because the state will have more women of childbearing age, according to a report Malson's office released Tuesday.
About 512,000 children were born in the state during 2010, down 3 percent from 2009 and 10 percent from 2007, according to state Department of Public Health numbers released this month. Those figures translate to 13.7 births per 1,000 residents.
The state's birth rate hasn't been that low since 1935, when, because of the Great Depression, people also had a gloomy view of the future.
Even taking into account the aging of California's population, the changes last year were stark: About 65 of every 1,000 women of child-bearing age had children in 2010, down from 73 per 1,000 during 2007.
Latinos, particularly those younger than 25, are driving the trend. Latinos still have higher birth rates than other ethnic groups in California, but the gap is shrinking rapidly.
In three years, the number of Latino births in California has fallen by 13 percent — twice the rate of decline among other ethnic groups. The birth rate among young California Latinos has fallen by more than 20 percent since 2007, a shift that normally takes decades.
Unlike their parents, many Latinos in California were born in the United States and "fertility drops between the first- and second-generation of immigrants," said Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California.
All of these trends across all ethnic groups will have lasting consequences, several demographers said.
At the personal level, the proverbial biological clock will constrain families currently putting off having children.
"The problem with delaying is that when a woman gets past 30, gradually and then significantly her fertility drops off," said Dr. Bill Gilbert, medical director for Sutter Women's Services in the Sacramento region. "Biology is one thing you can't argue with."
Children born to mothers older than 40 are at higher risk for certain health problems, including autism.
On the other hand, children born during this baby bust could have an easier time in life, because they might face less competition when applying for colleges and jobs.
More broadly, the declines eventually will affect schools as fewer kindergartners enroll. Painful school closings will follow, but the state also will save a chunk of money, since school funding is based on enrollment.
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