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Two leading experts are warning that the birth rate is dropping to levels where the population will start to decline unless the country adopts more "family-friendly" policies.
The founding director of Waikato University's Population Studies Centre, Professor Ian Pool, and his wife, medical demographer Dr Janet Sceats, say New Zealand's fertility rates "may join those of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, which are well below replacement".
They point to a rise in the median age of mothers giving birth from 23 in the late 1970s to 30 today, as women increasingly postpone children until they are established in their careers and can afford to buy into the country's inflated housing market.
In a major study on the history of the New Zealand family, they say the country "has failed its families" by abandoning historical pro-family policies such as universal family benefits and cheap housing loans, and allowing house prices and other changes to put "undue pressure" on families.
Our current fertility rate, at exactly two live births for every woman, is only a fraction below the replacement level of 2.1 which allows for replacing the woman and her partner and babies who die soon after birth.
But Dr Pool and Dr Sceats told the Weekend Herald that this relatively high rate in rich-world terms reflected a temporarily large number of women aged 30 to 34, which is now the main childbearing age. Once this bulge passes, they predict the fertility rate will drop to around Australia's 1.8.
The declining fertility rate and rising age of childbearing have produced a society where fewer than half of all households now contain children - down from 56 per cent of households in 1976 to 44 per cent today.
Both couples without children and single-person households have increased their shares of all households by 7 per cent in the same period.
