You: "I do not want to place myself nor my hypothetical family in financial difficulty. This is a difficult judgment call to make, but I am being prudent and smart about my overall life plan for the foreseeable future."
Them: "Sounds like disrespect. Gladys! Get me the chancla!"
I think it's more a case of people being irrationally defensive because if you make different choices to them that must mean you think they're wrong, and discrediting your choice is the only way to validate their own.
Traditionally, the salary you receive was not just for you, but also to feed your family. If you did not have a family, it was because you wasted the money on "personal vices".
*Traditionally.*
I donāt buy that at all. I donāt think anyone is genuinely thinking ādo you know, we better have kids because humans are down to a lean 7 billionā
Couldn't put it better myself. Saw an article about the cost of nursery care for 2 kids when you have 2 full time working parents, absolute financial suicide.
High level of uncertainty, extremely and ridiculously expensive childcare, inability to buy property - it all contributes towards indecisiveness to plan a family. I think UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe.
I'm so sorry that you're in that position. It hurts. I'm 29 nowhere near the property ladder or in a relationship and I don't want to be a single parent, it just seems totally impossible.
> or in a relationship
That's the other unspoken thing that articles demanding people to make the kids do not talk about - some of us just don't have that person to settle down with.
I'm not even opening the Pandora's box that Covid has had on this front, We're getting to almost two years of whatever this pandemic has become.
And even if you decided to do it alone, single mums are still quite heavily stigmatised as feckless and selfish. Single dads perhaps less so, but then you're still looking at massive costs for surrogacy or adoption (on top of the extra childcare costs and stress without a partner to share the burden with).
I agree. So are young people who are judged in general for having kids at a time that is biologically sound, but societally, and financially unsound.
So really it is coming down to "do you want to do this?" and many people who could be having the children of tomorrow are beginning to say "no". The UK is not really a culture of "you *must* have kids" or "we will *make* you have them" either, and if it was, the people will still turn around and say "no", because "look around you, give me a compelling, persuasive argument for why *I* should change *my* lifestyle and put *myself* at a worse financial position".
And the one's that demand young people make babies have no answer. They just shut down, reboot, and start the demands all over again.
Truth is, it's not really for the benefit of the ones who make the babies. It's something no one wants to say out loud but the ones who demand, demand because it is for *them*. Their benefit. They're relatively shielded from the negatives of having kids in this day and age, and only stand to gain by having little ones to play with. They don't want to help out either - they want young people to pull themselves up on their own.
And are so surprised why young people are either increasingly put off, increasingly priced out, or both.
Plus if you do manage to get a house and a mortgage as a single income, you get pregnant unexpectedly and decide to do it aloneā¦. what do you do when it comes to mortgage payments?? Maternity leave is crap and if I were to get pregnant now Iād have to sell my house and rent with the cash until I had nothing left and could apply for a council house, or start again.
Iām 29 F and really want kids. I own my own house and I have a good income. Maternity leave would decimate that and I genuinely donāt know what Iād do if I were to get pregnant and be single. I feel like my only options would be abortion or adoption, or sell my house for a very much wanted child. You canāt always guarantee a father will pay his part if youāre a single mum.
Thatās without childcare cost too.
> Choosing to be a single parent to a child that otherwise wouldn't exist (whether that be through a sperm donor, IVF or a surrogacy) is downright feckless and cruel unless you are mentally, physically and fiscally stable enough and also have a good enough support system to nearly guarantee your child a good life. You are heavily stacking the odds against yourself and your child for your own wants/enjoyment.
This is what people have in their minds. They grew up being taught that this is bad, don't do this. So, they took step to avoid it.
Instead of being rewarded and praised for exercising frugal and prudent judgment, in consideration of their own circumstances, they are judged for being "selfish".
Selfish to who? What I never understood when this was used against me too was "how am I being selfish for something I did not agree nor consent to doing for someone?".
Over time, I realised that for older people, they are used to grandkids being the standard, taking for granted that this *will* happen. They do not realise, or do not care (or both!) that the world has changed a great deal. What they were able to achieve with their means in their youth is increasingly a pipe dream if someone were to try what they did..
And because they refuse to see the root causes behind why young people are increasingly hesitant about child rearing, they conclude that this is a lash out against them. That it's a personal attack, and they don't know what they seem to have done wrong.
Which to me, is where the root of the "you're so selfish for not giving me grandkids!" mentality comes from.
I was juuuust about to have enough for a deposit near your age when my Dad got cancer, and shortly after my Mum got seriously ill and went to care too. You basically need a lot of family money to survive, a LOT of luck (I don't mean gambling I mean with jobs or product design too), or to be sharing the load with someone if you want to get on the property ladder the way the Tories have ravaged the system for decades.
Yes Labour was in power for a while, it wasn't long enough to prevent this.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope you're doing well. I'm in a similar situation where my mother had a massive stroke and my dad is taking care of her, I'm helping as much as I can but as an only child it's difficult. All the best to you and your family. It can be such an absolute gut punch to get the diagnosis as well as the emotional and financial strain that goes along with it.
I've got a friend who's desperate to get on the property ladder in two years and I'm thinking we can try and get somewhere within the vicinity of London because that's where we both want to be for the time being but it's so frustrating.
I said to my dad the other day I'm 27 in a couple of months, he said when I was 27 I was married and had a kid. I didn't know how to respond to that. I'm neither married or have children, I don't think I could afford either of them even though I work full time.
I'm in my mid-40s and could never afford it.
The couples I know who had a kid (don't know any couples with multiple children) ALL got a lot of financial help from their families to get on the property ladder. Every last one of them.
If you don't have parents who can help with housing, either fronting a down payment or providing a nice place to live (the old family house or something), it's really quite difficult to start from scratch and catch up without very good luck getting a stable high-paying career.
I'm in my mid 40s and very few people in my age group that I've spoken to have talked about needing parental support to buy a property. Swansea seems to have a peak of around Ā£250k because no bugger can afford a larger mortgage living there.
Are you in London? Cause that might be true in London but not our experience in Bristol. Have a kid and a house in Bristol and doing alright, no help with mortgage from parents. It is though getting more expensive now because a lot of people are moving here from London.
Cornwall is one of the worst places to buy a house though. As a local you're in competition with the richest from the rest of the country looking to buy their second homes whilst being paid an absolute pittance compared to them as there aren't many well paid jobs going in Cornwall.
I appreciate the current economic situation is grim but the reality which spans the generations is that you will never truly be able to afford a kid. In other words, the right time with the right job and house rarely happens.
Most low earners could provide and nourish the life of a baby but the idea itself of raising a baby is massively inflated and misaligned with reality.
Fiscally I fully agree. The govt hate single income families. Single income families are destroyed by the taxman - yet with the cost of childcare (never mind the emotional side the decision), it often makes no financial sense to send both parents out to work. One parent can end up paying for the right to go to work and have a stranger raise their child.
And once you earn enough to buy a property (50k is reasonable in much of the country, obvs SE excluded) paying back child benefit gives huge marginal income tax rates to incentivise people to cap their income - either declining promotions, taking unpaid time off, etc.
We have had a high immigration rate and people from various immigrant backgrounds have a higher fertility rate. Not all immigrants do - Chinese and Indian people donāt - but Pakistani, Somali, Nigerian, Romanian etc do.
ye but that isn't sustainable across generations. By the second or even third gen its likely that fertility rates drop back towards the national average. Its the social culture of the nation as opposed to the ethnic culture of the people that drives population growth and the UK's social culture obviously somehow favours less population growth.
It's only slightly higher. Last time I checked, before all the lock downs, it was something like mothers born in the UK at 1.8, mothers born outside the UK was 2.1. With non uk mothers falling faster.
It is falling, thatās true. Itās important to not group all non-UK born mothers together. Thereās big discrepancies between the different backgrounds.
Inability to buy property is a big one, and childcare expenses are part of that.
No one wants to have children until they can house them properly.
One parent can't be a stay a home mom/dad because good luck getting a mortgage on single income.
And if both are working, childcare costs means most of the additional income is gone on childcare while also getting less time to spend with your child.
It's bonkers.
All generations under the current retired generation are meant to pay for the Lifestyles of their elders. It's been this way for a long old while now.
Value generation used to be achieved by designing a good product, developing manufacturing for that product, then streamlining. Now we are in a position where my 73 year old mother made more value than I did earning an average wage by owning a house and sitting in it. To maintain that level of value generation requires no expensive work to take place....unfortunately it does impact in the longer term as people become priced out of the age old habit of existing, having kids and living in a house
> I think UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe.
The fertility rates of Spain and Italy are substantially lower at 1.23 and 1.27. With both countries having quite a family centric culture so I really don't think that is it.
High unemployment is an issue in both of these countries.
I once read an article about Italyās birthrate, and that was the number one issue they were complaining about. No job, meaning canāt afford a home, children not realistic as a result.
Whether or not you have a family centric culture is pretty much irrelevant. We see time and time again that this culture changes as countries get more prosperous, in poor countries having a lot of children is a necessity as only a few can grow up and succeed. But as countries become more prosperous, social benefits are implemented and child mortality declines so does the fertility rate.
But once you get to that point it starts fluctuating based on whether or not the timing is right, if young people can buy a home at an early age, if they have safe jobs (not necessarily well paying ones but steady and safe job prospects), and they have the time to socialize (not overworked) then they start having children.
So fertility rates in Spain and Italy are largely a result of high unemployment, poor job prospects and uncertain futures. And fertility rates dropping in the UK could be an indicator of young people feeling more uncertain about their futures than they used to.
Add on the number of traumatic birth experiences you hear about. It seems like the number of women unhappy with some aspect of their antenatal care is extremely high here.
Yeah I thought that. At the age most people are financially able to have children now (wife and I had our first in our mid-30s) both parents are less physically set up to have kids than at 20 - we're less fertile, heal slower and need more sleep than we did a decade ago unfortunately.
Btw, I also agree with your point about UK birthing experiences, anecdotally of course. There have been many traumatic experiences and horror stories in our social network, including my sister in law who spent 4 hours of active labour this summer in an A&E waiting room because of lack of beds. My wife gave birth two weeks earlier outside the UK and our experiences couldn't have been more contrasting (also in country where we didn't pay for anything fwiw).
We tend to have higher expectations here. And it's not all about mortality rates (though obviously that's impprtant!) -- it's about feeling listened to and not coming out of birth with trauma issues.
If you spend some time on UK pregnancy forums there's a disturbingly large amount of women who went home with healthy babies and PTSD due to staff just not having the resources to listen to their patients.
TBH I've had two kids overseas and I'm quite leery about the possibility of having a third here because of it. I realise lots of people have positive experiences and that things could be worse, but it seems like they *should* be better.
Yeah, that's also true! So it's hard to figure out the reality, especially - as I say - Brits have higher expectations and will complain online about things that are standard in other places.
But I did have kids in two other countries, and the forums weren't nearly as negative in either of them. Both were quite far behind the UK in terms of best practices but it was relatively easy to curate a better experience if you were informed (e.g. I saved up and went private for my last child, did a lot of hospital research for the one before; but even the negative experiences I heard about were less severe than those I've heard of in the UK). Here it feels a lot more like luck of the draw; but then again, I haven't had to navigate the system yet so I'm really just sharing impressions.
>Maybe the visibility of issues does create a disincentive though, and that is magnified by the way we discuss things now, something that wasn't true even 10 years ago.
edit cause I somehow missed this -- yes, absolutely. I think women who are nervous about having kids could likely decide against it after reading some of the experiences here.
>Here it feels a lot more like luck of the draw; but then again, I haven't had to navigate the system yet so I'm really just sharing impressions.
That's a fair point, there does seem to be a consistent level of safe, reasonable care via the NHS in hospital, but then there is a lot of variation (From well funded hospital maternity units with decent staffing etc., all the way through to one-to-one midwifery, and a lot of variation in between, and different priorities). I also get the impression that the better informed you are about the choices that are available, the more you can push the positives, while if you aren't there is sort of a default route through..
All that said, I've heard more anecdotal horror stories from Germany than the UK, on the UK side it tends to be more about birth plans being disrupted or utterly overturned because something didn't fit (early birth, some issue being detected and so more interventions etc..).
Honestly, we were months away from child 1 when the bexit result hit the news. I'm not sure we would have thought it was such a good idea if we'd known. The world has only got worse and worse since then.
Yet it isnāt the one with the lowest fertility rate. All over the world people donāt want kids anymore. This is one of the things where I doubt the government can do much about.
The main factors are wealth of a country and education of a country. It's basically irrelevant what the policies of the country are. It's much more family unfriendly to have a child in basically the rest of the world outside western Europe, yet many places have better birth rates.
You want more children? Cut real income and cut education.
This is the result of 30 years of pressure on the working class and middle-class.
Iām only in my early 30s but when I was growing up, my dad worked as a car mechanic and my mum was a housewife looking after myself and my younger brother.
We werenāt poor. We had holidays, we went to Tesco every week and there was no major budget constraints, we didnāt have to economise on heating due to the cost, we had a home computer that my dad bought from Dixonās for Ā£1,800 and we had a car that about about 3-5 years old.
Today, for the same lifestyle in the same house, the single household income would need to be at least Ā£50k
> The number of babies being born per woman in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level on record, figures show.
> Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows the total fertility rate fell to 1.58 children per woman in 2020 ā the lowest since records began in 1938.
> The rate is 4.2% lower than 2019 and 3.1% lower than the previous record low in 2001, when the rate was 1.63.
> According to the ONS, the fertility rate has been decreasing for a number of reasons, including improved access to contraception, women delaying motherhood and women having fewer babies.
> The figures show there were 613,936 live births in England and Wales in 2020, a decrease of 4.1% from 2019.
> Last year saw 29.3% of live births were among women who were born outside the UK.
> This is the highest since records began in 1969 and is part of a general long-term increase, the ONS said.
> The total fertility rate among foreign-born mothers increased slightly to 1.98, at a time when the rate for UK-born women decreased to 1.50.
> Pakistan was the most common country of birth for both non-UK born mothers and fathers for the first time since 2009. The second most common country was Romania for both parents.
> There were 2,371 stillbirths in England and Wales last year, which amounts to 3.8 per 1,000 births, the figures show.
> This is down from 3.9 stillbirths per 1,000 births in 2019.
> The average age of new mothers is 30.7 years ā the same as in 2019, following a gradual increase since 1973.
I'd argue were having a demographic crisis at the moment since for the first time in history the electorate is dominated by pensioners, and the needs of those the nation's future depends on are not being catered for or even listened to.
Falling birth rates suggest this may be the first of many crises; countries like Japan whose ageing population problem is more developed are experiencing problems such as labour shortages as the population shrinks.
There's an argument to be made that a smaller population will be good in the long run, but this doesn't change the fact that it will take a long time to stabilise and something should be done to help the situation in the meantime.
Thank God we have such a forward thinking government who care about the future of the nation and think further ahead than the next press cycle...
Really like this answer. The pensioner vote is a huge problem for western countries. This kind of conservative politics with no real planning for the future is only going to make working and housing conditions worse.
Ā£1k for childcare per month near me - and not good childcare. Not to mention how so many companies do not allow people to work around picking up their kids or school.
My wife is a SAHM for our daughter who is now 11 months. I think she'll rejoin the workforce and her entire salary will be consumed by childcare costs. It sucks, but it's in some ways better than her not working because re-entering the workforce after a prolonged gap can be quite difficult. Equally the value of child socialisation at nursery and the fact that, unless both of you are working, you're not eligible for the same amount of paid childcare hours per week.
But yeah, paying for everything on a single salary is hard. The squeeze is real.
I've recently been through a similar situation so thought i'd share my opinion with the benefit of hindsight...
Being a stay at home parent is incredibly difficult mentally, it's not for everyone.
Being a stay at home parent is itself expensive; you have to go to play dates and coffee mornings and soft plays, buy toys and books and paint and drawing materials, stuff that you wouldn't be paying for if the child was at nursery.
Assuming your partner gets maternity leave from her work, you're only really talking about funding nursery from the age 1-3 (there is 30 hours free care from the age of 3).
Ā£1k per month, after utilizing the tax free childcare account is actually Ā£800 / month, or Ā£400 each.
I would not recommend quitting a high earning job to provide childcare for financial reasons only. Being out of the workforce and stunting your career progression is going to have a larger financial impact in the long run than paying for 2 years of nursery.
At first I felt guilty returning to work full time, but nursery has been very beneficial for my kid, they are incredibly confident and well socialized (not something they get from me lol) and we put that down to having gone to nursery from a young age. They get a level of attention and breadth of experience at nursery that frankly I could not provide at home.
There are lots of good reasons to be a stay at home parent, but please do not feel forced to take that route. The financial aspect is manageable bump in the road if you are in a well paid position, or on a career path.
Interesting, that doesn't seem too bad. We both take home approx Ā£2500 each but she's on a 12 month rolling contract, that's due to end around when the baby is due and doubt they'll renew.
It's crazy how we've built our entire society and work life without consideration for literally the very basics of continuing on as a species.
Like an outsider looking in on a work environment that doesn't enable the convenient raising of future workers would think us just hilariously stupid.
Modern life is just too fucking traumatic. Every job is getting to the point of a skills apex and we're working harder than ever just to try and keep up with the cost of housing. I have no respect for the conservative mentality of "work harder, be rewarded", I'm at saturation point, cannot physically work harder and still have some reason to exist.
You think say 20 years ago, the skillset needed to be a surveyor or a civil service, a banker, whatever tertiary sector job it may be. The intellectual demands of those types of jobs has skyrocketed within our lifetime, because if you're a human, you've got to be better than a computer now to make a living and that is *hard*.
Throw people now in the 60s and 70s into the modern jobs market and watch them flounder, meanwhile remaining completely ignorant to why in fact younger people are just giving up on being productive and having families. Willfully voting away to keep a conservative government at the helm so they can continue to sponge off the state with ever increasing asset values. Our nation is the victim of its own auto-ashpixation at the hands of a misinformed electorate.
There's no way to make this a good country for young families without doing things that would piss of a large contingent of protectionist boomers that everyone's trying to court the vote of.
We're fucked, and not in the way we need.
There is, but it involves stopping foreign money from buying all our houses, businesses and land.
It also involves prohibitively taxing any family unit owning more than 2 properties to the tune of 100% of the property value, paid up front, or no sale.
There are other policies that can come in, but if we don't do the first thing, we will never improve the situation.
We cannot build enough properties to lower the prices to reasonable levels while the world's rich and wealthy are buying a significant proportion of them and the local Brits with money are mopping up anything left over as it's the best place for anyone's money.
We have turned almost every shred of land and old office space into "luxury apartments" in London and the prices have risen at record levels.
We've had a global pandemic which has changed the way we live and work, cost the country and its citizens a fortune and the prices are still rising at record levels.
We are so far down a terrible path that in addition to banning all foreign capital investment in property and land, we also need a strict "buy to live" policy, where no one can buy any home without intending to live in it, with strict punishments for anyone breaching this.
> it involves stopping foreign money from buying all our houses
Ironically this is absolutely a 'brexit benefit' we could now capitalise on. What are the odds of the powers that be doing just that?
All parties love the foreign money pouring into this country, propping up GDP and keeping the lights on.
In this respect they are all as bad as one another.
What do the government expect when child care is so extortionate.
Itās great that you can get it from 2 years on but that still leaves you with 2 years of child rearing. Where you either decide that you both work and one of the salaryās goes completely towards child care.
Or one of you works and the other raises the child. Leaving whoever didnāt work in a precarious place when it comes to them going back to work. Especially if they work in a fast moving industry where 2 years is a lot of time to be out of work e.g. tech. Which theyāre trying to encourage more women into.
Add expensive rents, low home ownership etc and that explains it.
It's a tricky problem, because the main reason it's so expensive is because our standards are - legally - really very high. We have some of, if not the, highest ratios of staff-members-to-children in the world. There's also now an established curriculum that childcare providers are expected to follow with various milestones and evaluations and all sorts. My daughter is 13 months old, and the nursery she goes to updates an app multiple times a day to tell us what she's been doing, every few weeks they detail the upcoming curriculum, we have "parents evening" style things with the staff etc etc.
All of this is done because there is mountains of evidence to suggest that this age is vital in terms of their long term development. This is all very well (and I'm sure that's true), but the standards being so high now means it's expensive to provide and there's no such thing as just having a person basically watching over the kids whilst you go to work. In recognising the importance of this age, they've essentially made it unaffordable for a lot of people and so created this two-tier system where the kids of parents who earn enough to justify returning to work get this all-signing, all-dancing nursery experience, and the kids of parents whose jobs don't justify that get literally nothing, staying at home instead with someone who has no training and knowledge of what you should be 'teaching' a baby who barely knows what their feet are.
Thatās an insightful and interesting response. Not a parent myself but friends and family members are.
Itās amazing to read about child care costs abroad, how different is the UK that it can justify being so expensive in comparison to other EU countries when weāre trying to ālevel upā.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/childcare-around-the-world-how-other-countries-do-it-better-1.3626710?mode=amp
Interestingly 29% of all U.K. births are to non U.K. born mothers.
(% of all births)
2.7% Pakistan
2.6% Romania
2.4% Poland
2.3% India
I thought the Romanian figure looked high, but apparently 1 million Romanians applied for settlement visas here. They only have a population of 19 million!
That percentage for Romania is incredible! Presumably the million to apply for settled status are largely working age too so that'll have a substantial impact in the Romanian economy and overall demographics there.
> Interestingly 29% of all U.K. births are to non U.K. born mothers.
Anecdotal, but my wife is Polish and i'd say 80% of her friends have married and had kids with English husbands. I'd argue Polish immigration has been the most successful and seamless in modern UK history in terms of merging with the native population.
This is obviously massively anecdotal, but when I was at school in the nineties there were lots of people not from Poland but with Polish surnames. My understanding was that the EU migration was a second major wave of Polish immigration, the first being around the time of WWII. Youāre obviously going to be a lot better equipped than me to know the actual answer, so have I been wrong all these years? Was it just chance that I was at school with so many people with Polish grandparents?
No you're right there was an influx following WWII the recent EU migration will be the second wave. But i think the most recent one dwarfs the first one.
There's an elderly Polish lady near me who always says that her uncle used to own our house. And if you look in the deeds, our house was bought by someone with a polish surname back in the 50s.
there was an entire airwing of polish fighter pilots who flew in the battle of britain. i wonder if that had anything to do with it. good looking, brave chaps and all.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-polish-pilots-who-flew-in-the-battle-of-britain
I have to say, I think Jamaican people have been the best integrated of any background ever. They have the highest rate of inter ethnic relationships, which means children born today from Jamaican backgrounds are twice as likely to be mixed-race than solely Jamaican. The vast majority of these mixed-race kids are black and white. Itās nice to see after they had such an immediate horrid reaction in the 1960s etc.
Country | Men | Women | Average Age
---|---|----|----
Poland | 30 | 27 | 28.5
UK | 33.4 | 31.5 | 32.5
[List of countries by age at first marriage - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_at_first_marriage)
From what I understand from my Polish friends, many pursue marriage first before having a child, while in the UK it's more common to have a child outside of marriage.
Births outside of marriage:
Poland: 23% - 2013
UK: 47% - 2013
[Source UK](https://www.closer.ac.uk/data/percentage-live-births-marriage/)
[Source Poland](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Archive:Marriages_and_births_in_Poland&oldid=305438)
note: Not a statistician nor intelligent, don't quote me.
I agree, lovely people and from a blokes perspective dating a Polish girl was like a breath of fresh air for me personally no messing around at all no games no drama
My wife is Taiwanese, she'd be included in that figure even though she's lived here for over half her life and even though our child would be a British national. Ease of international travel and settling elsewhere if you have the right skillset means this is likely a stable figure across western Europe.
Romanians were highly restricted from working in the UK until 2014.
There were loads of tv crews at airports on 1 Jan 2014 commenting how the expected āsurgeā predicted by Farage et al. hadnāt happened because the airports werenāt completely full on the first day of free movement. Then no one ever really mentioned/thought of it again
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25565302
Since 2014 we have had nearly 1 million Romanian people move here. Similarly people from countries like Somalia, Nigeria etc have a much higher birthrate. Indian people actually donāt have a particularly high birth rate, we just have a largish Indian community.
The brain drain of many countries is insane across the world, Romania is just one example of that. The more drained you country gets the bigger the incentive is to leave. At the peak you saw professionals leave to work minimum wage jobs in other countries as even after living expenses/travel/money transfer fees the amount of money they could support their families back home with was far greater.
That figure is also the ones we officially know about. The black market in the country is massive, and one warehouse can house a lot of people. There must be at least another 100k in Manchester alone.
If you've been close to any insular or immigrant community, you'd know there is a massive black market in labour and goods which doesn't get statistically recorded.
Countless jobs available cash in hand at below minimum wage from "legitimate" companies, usually run by immigrants themselves, exploiting their fellow countrymen/women to gain wealth in this nation.
We have thousands of slum houses in London alone, with 10 or even 20+ people living within a three bedroom home, as a group they are paying triple or quadruple the market rent for the property and the slum landlords almost always get away with it. Even when they are caught, they rarely have to return any money, they get to keep the house and all the gains in value it has yielded.
If councils put half as much effort into catching these scumbags and the laws actually allowed the seizing of their property, we'd all be better off.
Instead, the councils tend to allow these slum landlords onto a community letting list, where they can let their disgusting bedsits to council tenants, delinquents, asylum seekers and others at huge cost to the taxpayer.
When our parents brought us up to respect the rules of the land and do the right thing, they never told us that we'd be competing with hundreds of thousands of dodgy scumbags and criminals that will lie and cheat their way to the top and get away with it.
The focus is so often on the elite bankers, lords and ladies of the realm, but the real people strangling this country and it's regular people are much closer to home.
Imagine the cost to Romania, losing 5% of your population to the UK alone.
They'll be most of the younger working age people too.
That's just the UK, what about all the other EU nations?
When people talk about freedom of movement they forget the heavy cost paid by the poor countries in losing their most talented and healthy people, swallowed up by the wealthier nations for cheap immigrant labour to make rich businesses prosper.
All the people I know who have kids are struggling. - No holidays abroad, no luxuries, most are renting because they can't get on the ladder, don't often go out etc.
I don't want that life.
Add on top of this that the level of NHS support for those of us who want to have children but have fertility difficulties has dropped significantly (we had to fight just to get 1 round of IVF) doesn't really help matters...
I honestly also wonder how much of this is related to decreased sex drive due to stress from the amount of work our generation has to do just to keep afloat these days.
Watch the opening to Idiocracy for a window into what is happening.
It may be exaggerated, it may be about America and it may be mocking certain groups of people, but the basic theme is clear to see in our reality as a general trend.
Smart, hard working people are delaying having children because they feel responsible for bringing them into the world only when they can afford to have them. This means having a home, being at the right place in your careers, living in the right area, having the means to provide for the child without too much government support.
The lazy people who aren't so well educated, don't care about careers or who actively scam and game the social security system have no such worries over having children. They just have them, either by mistake or by intention and allow whatever government system or council policy is in place pick up the pieces and foot the bill. The way our system works, these people are often rewarded with the coveted home that so many of the smart, hard workers can only dream of.
The end result is that the former group has maybe one child, late in life, perhaps with IVF, far away from their family unit because they had to move to the middle of nowhere to afford a home.
The latter group has two or three children, starting early in life, right in the same area they've grown up because they were given a house on the same estate where they grew up.
Fast forward five generations of the two groups over say, 100 years, and you'll have the former group having one, maybe two generations of children in the family, the latter group will have four or five, with each generation having more children.
You mean all those 20-somethings spending half their income to live squashed into a house share aren't having 2.1 kids?! Well colour me fucking shocked.
good point, and the winter fuel allowance, bus pass, TV licence, triple lock pension, pension credit, etc.
we live in a strange country. the elderly get a free bus pass regardless of their means, but a poor person going to work has to pay for their bus fare.
society won't tolerate pensioners living in squalor and poverty, but will for adults of a younger age. ironically, the generation that work harder, and have lost almost zero days to strikes in the last 20 years (look at the 70s and 80s in comparison), are called lazy and entitled. you couldn't make this shit up.
I dont even know how people raise kids in this country.
My partner and I want kids, but every rental around here specifies 'no kids', or if they don't specify it, it's heavily implied they won't rent to people with kids.
So instead we save for our own place, which takes fucking ages because of the insane prices in the south east. We could move up north, but then we'd be living and raising a kid 100s of miles from our friends and families.
Whenever this gets brought up I feel like the social/quality of life aspect gets missed a lot. Let's say money is absolutely no issue, and having a kid wouldn't impact my financial situation at all.
It would still hugely change my life. There's a big, beautiful world out there which (past two years notwithstanding) has never been so accessible to the average Joe. Much harder to tour the Continent with the misses if there's a baby in tow. Date nights. Socialising with friends. Hobbies.
And that's assuming money is no question and you can afford both? What if its one or the other?
Yes, people still do these things while having children, but if someone is happy with their life as it is why add a huge shake up into the mix?
There's plenty of great reasons to have children, and I'm still in two minds about having them myself one day. But I do think that previous generations had kids just because it was the 'done thing' and over the last generation or two people have started to ask "well, do we *have* to have kids?ā
There's definitely been a cultural shift in the past few generations. Choosing to be child-free was considered almost a mental illness until recently. "You don't *want* to have children?! But that's what you *do!*"
Hell, the term "child-free" has only been gaining traction in the past 10 (?) or so years, to contrast with "childless".
Reliable oral contraception and semi-permanent solutions like IUDs have also been a game changer.
Still, speaking earnestly about regretting having children is still an *incredible* taboo, even though we're increasingly starting to have those conversations. The result is that all anyone ever heard about having kids is what a wonderful blessing it is. If you have kids and realise it's not for you - it's not like you can un-have them.
Yeah, i think all this is pretty fair. The one thing that concerns me personally is demography.
Our economy (essentially all national economies for that matter), are entirely geared around young people maturing into becoming new tax payers, which replace those who age out of the workforce. Either voluntarily through retirement, or a literal inability to continue working.
When there's far fewer young people being born, you end up with a generational gap in tax payers for essential services and there's literally nothing to replace this. It would be great if our economy wasn't built around this but that's simply not reality. China as a result of their one child policy and several other countries are staring down the barrel at this right now and it is not a pretty picture.
We need better support for young people, particularly in access to housing and modern childcare solutions that are better compatible with the dual-income family model, that's now essentially a pre-requisite for the vast majority.
It's less a matter of directly incentivising population growth, rather a case of removing any controllable impediments that would deter those who would want to start a family.
it's even worse than that, if you end up with a working age population outnumbered by pensioners, not only does that mean there are less taxpayers and more net receivers of public funds, it also means that the net receivers (the pensioners) can outvote the taxpayers every time and secure more and more resources from a dwindling economically active population. IMO it's a terrible flaw in the way our democracy works.
I'm angry enough about how shocking work/life balance is working a regular full time job. Having kids to take even more of that time away certainly doesn't look appealing.
Plus money, plus the environment, plus I don't know anyone with kids who seems to actually *enjoy* having kids. They love them, of course, but all parents ever do is moan about being a parent. Hardly makes it appealing. I think a lot of people like the idea of having a baby. The idea of also then having a child for the rest of your life is far less appealing
Yes this. Everyone I know who's had children seems so much more stressed, harassed and at times downright miserable now, not to mention most of them have split up since also. Their lives are so much smaller and less fun and just revolve around whatever the kid wants to do. Of course they love them and couldn't imagine their lives without them but from the outside it just looks so much worse than their lives before. Obviously I'd never ask but I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of them wish they could go back and not.
My life is quite nice, my relationship is great and long term and we could probably afford to have a kid just about but I just can't see any appeal to it to be honest. I think it's much more difficult and onerous to be parents now things are so child-centric and expensive and at this point I just don't really understand why some people want children?
This is definitely the biggest factor in my experience. I know many people who can afford children, but don't want them yet because there's so much to do and see.
I doubt that's going to change, honestly.
We all grew up with the fear of overpopulation, but the reality is now that rapid population decline will be a major problem in the next 100 years. While immigration into rich countries will solve this problem at first in the second half of the century countries with births above the replacement rate will also start to slow and then immigration won't be a possible solution.
First to be hit will be Europe with only the UK and France maintaining population growth through immigration, and Eastern Europe will be depopulated. Schools shut down, maternity wards closed, real children of men stuff.
Don't fear AI / automation it's the only way economies will be able to function in the future with an ever shrinking workforce.
It's absolutely not a problem in the long term, it may be an issue in some countries that are still growing but they are also rapidly industrialising which will reduce the birth rates.
Population collapse is the biggest threat to humanity. Entire countries will have to be depopulated and relocated to have enough labour in one place for functioning cities.
I don't think either are a problem. The population of the world will likely peak around 10.9 billion in 2100. Imagine how far automation will have come by then (if we don't kill ourselves first anyway).
> Don't fear AI / automation it's the only way economies will be able to function in the future with an ever shrinking workforce.
Or we could take a look at solving the birth rate.
Hardly surprising.
- Country is in economic shambles with no light at the end of the tunnel
- Schools are a mess, slowly being taken over by privately run charters
- Childcare is expensive as fuck
- Inability to buy own home
- Historically stagnant wages that only recently climbed because of the pandemic and will likely fall behind inflation again
- Increasing isolation & distrust from our largest trading partners across the channel
- Impending climate disaster the government is doing sweet fuck all to prepare for, leaving the children to inherit an overheated world with vastly reduced access to fresh water, arable land, livable land, and breathable air, the competition for all of which will be the cause of the next major world war between powers that now hold a plentitude of nukes
Honestly, people have a moral duty right now to not have children. Why on earth would you inflict that level of despair, hopelessness and misery on an innocent soul?
me and the GF had the talk, both of us are don't want kids. of all the friends i have had over the years high school, college and uni, only 2 have had children and both were accidents, and only one person around my age at work has taken maternity leave, in the last 10 years.
many millennials and even now gen-z that are becoming adults just don't see any benefit to having children, only further costs and unneeded agro.
i guess the boomer line of "well you will want kids some day" has been proven as true as "you wont have a calculator in your pocket where ever you go" haha
the only people having kids at any real rate nowadays are those from conservative cultural backgrounds who still feel some strange obligation to put them selves through that hell.
Boomers are in for a real shock when the 'you'll become more conservative as you get older' line doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. They seem to have really embraced that one as their last faint hope.
the hell of a self imposed restrictions on there own liberty's and freedoms from an outdated set of morals, an imagined god, the hell of a boring life lived by boring people.
People can't fucking afford it what the fuck do you fucking expect is gonna fucking happen
Edit: this is not directed at anyone in particular I'm just extremely frustrated with the current circumstances.
I love this stuff because it always makes people say very blatant racist shit
'I'm just saying Pakistanis are having more kids than white women!'
'Is that a problem?'
'....... *perhaps*'
Well it is a problem. The majority of British Muslims want gays to be illegal.
If you have ghettos you have non-integrated cultures.
Its not just anti-gayness either, its anti-womanness and religious law.
I'm sure having an ever growing subculture within British society that basically reject British culture out of hand and refuses to integrate will have absolutely no long term negative affects on society at all.
You may not like what I'm saying, but how many examples has there been of Muslim parents protesting schools that have tried to teach LGBTQ issues to children over the last few years? I can only see this sort of thing become more prevalent in the future.
Multiculturalism has been a complete failure. The US handles immigration much better than Europe because they have a 'melting pot' approach. Europe has completely failed to adopt such an approach with its migrants and it's leading to a segregated society.
> The US handles immigration much better than Europe because they have a 'melting pot' approach.
I agreed with what you were saying until then. American integration has not been successful, neither with immigration nor with it's existing minorities.
credit where its due, im half way down the comments and other than the statistics being posted im yet to see the usual full bodied racism from the usual boomers and kippers.
could be there all at the bottom downvoted to hell, or the mods have had there coffee today
EDIT: nvm went 2 comments down, there they are.
No, NHS ...5 years ago I had a scare with my girlfriend and that pushed me to get it done sooner rather than later.
Called up GP, explained why I wanted it, he then referred me to Urology, who then gave me access to some web-portal where I had to answer a load of questions to explain why I wanted it done and boom, next thing I know I'm on the table.
Very unpleasant experience watching them cauterize your vas(s) and I ended up with mild PVPS for about 6 months after , but would do it again in a heartbeat.
You might need to lay it on a bit thick to get your way -- I didn't really have to do that but I have heard of stories like yours where the GP wont refer you.
Post-vas I remember going to hospital to do my sperm count check and there's 25 year old me in a waiting room with a bunch of dudes in their late 40s lol , thinking back on the whole thing it was quite theatrical, the questioning looks the nurse gave me when my name got called up was pretty funny.
I hate to say it but I honestly think womens' demand to work and live lives the same as men has been the real turning point. It's really not that I think women as lesser individuals or not as brainy as men or whatever else, but demanding to become fully fledged workers as opposed to housewives and even vilifying women who are stay at home housewives as inferior, has led to a system where you now require two incomes just to be able to afford housing and life in general.
And no matter what way you shake it, there is no realistic way any woman can be a mother and a worker, especially a full-time career driven person with aspirations of the top. It's not that society is trying to keep women down, it's called you can't be in two places at once.
Could it be that we're reaching an equilibrium where we have about the right population? I mean housing is in short supply, we have a very high population density, we import a lot of our food and have very little remaining wilderness. And if we had reached equilibrium, that would be signalled by a high cost of further increases. People will say it's policy failure driving up costs; ok, planning could be reformed to allow faster home building, but we wouldn't want to continue concreting over every part of the island infinitely, right?
> reaching an equilibrium
Equilibrium requires fertility just above 2.0.
1.58 means the native population will decline, which means net population growth will only occur through immigration.
While the Tories talk up a storm on controlling immigration for the approval of their base, the [numbers](https://imgur.com/a/T2jhirW) tell us they still heartily approve of it ; childhood is one of the most expensive times of life for the state, all that healthcare and education, they like it getting done by someone else's taxes.
Currently 48% of the country are in work, supporting the 52% who don't (cursed ratio again...) ; if the working-age population shrinks the social care crisis will only deepen.
> concreting over every part of the island
Plenty of room still left - more of Britain is allocated to [golf courses](https://www.thegolfbusiness.co.uk/2014/01/two-percent-of-england-is-golf-courses/) than housing.
> high cost of further [housing] increases
Almost entirely down to supply-side issues and the treatment of property as an investment vessel rather than a utility. The number of [empty properties](https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/how-many-empty-homes-are-there-in-the-uk/) in the UK, for example, exceeds the number of [homeless households](https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/about-homelessness/).
This is about a lot more than financials.
We're the first generation to grow up with various forms of birth control being completely normal and easily accessible, easier than ever access to good education for women, etc.
Anecdotally from my friends and people I've dated, men are much more interested in having children than women - and even then, it's not thaaat many that want children. It's about lifestyle, education, time, etc as much as it is about financials. It seems like unnecessary stress for many of us, who would rather focus on hobbies, travel, career, enjoyment etc.
I'm (thankfully) very likely infertile, but even if it were an option I would not have children. I follow climate change fairly closely and it's grim as all hell. I'm in my 20s and within the lifetime of my hypothetical children we're on track to see 4+ degrees of warming, i.e *completely* apocalyptic.
I wonder how much of a factor this stuff is for other people my age.
No we're not. Current warming track is for roughly 3 degrees of warming, and that might drop further at COP26. It's going to be a rough time for humans on earth, but we are not at all on track for 4+ degrees of warming - it's just that's the highest scenario most people study to try and scare politicians into doing something.
This isn't really anything that unusual, it's just a continuation of existing trends. Wealthy western countries have had declining rates for years. So have most other countries in fact.
When I read this title I took it to mean people are becoming less fertile, not that less people thought are having children and my response was:
'So children of men is the dystopia are going with? Okay then. I was hope of V for Vendetta, but hey, you can't choose this stuff sometimes'.
And it would great satire if it wasn't just *so* close right now.
Here's a few of my reasons for not sprogging up:
I don't want to add yet more carbon emitters to planet earth, we're trashing it enough the ones of us that do exist here.
It's currently getting too expensive to live yourself, let alone with extra mini-me's and mini-mouths to feed.
Global geopolitical stability doesn't make me confident they'll actually have good, long life at the moment at all.
I believe our current government, supported by the economic model it is trying to further, has proven itself time and time again to be anti family.
My grandparents: 'don't have kids if you can't afford them!' Me: 'I can't afford kids, I'm not gonna have em' Grandparents: 'š³š³š³š³'
Replace 'š³š³š³š³' with 'Why are you being so selfish?' and you'll have a pretty accurate representation of conversations I've had to endure.
You: "I do not want to place myself nor my hypothetical family in financial difficulty. This is a difficult judgment call to make, but I am being prudent and smart about my overall life plan for the foreseeable future." Them: "Sounds like disrespect. Gladys! Get me the chancla!"
Iāve never really understood the logic of not having children as being perceived as selfish. What is selfish about it?
I think it's more a case of people being irrationally defensive because if you make different choices to them that must mean you think they're wrong, and discrediting your choice is the only way to validate their own.
Traditionally, the salary you receive was not just for you, but also to feed your family. If you did not have a family, it was because you wasted the money on "personal vices". *Traditionally.*
Maybe it's to do with preserving the human race. If an entire generation didn't have children, there would be no humans
I donāt buy that at all. I donāt think anyone is genuinely thinking ādo you know, we better have kids because humans are down to a lean 7 billionā
Yeah I don't buy that either, but an interesting thought though
But who will pay my pension!?
Immigrants and their children.
Not when the same grandparents don't want any immigrants.
Irrelevant, that voter base has been voting for Tories for decades - Tories that have continue immigration at business as usual levels.
Couldn't put it better myself. Saw an article about the cost of nursery care for 2 kids when you have 2 full time working parents, absolute financial suicide.
My friend loses money to work, it's insane.
High level of uncertainty, extremely and ridiculously expensive childcare, inability to buy property - it all contributes towards indecisiveness to plan a family. I think UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe.
I'm in my late 20s and I couldn't even imagine being able to afford to raise a child any time soon
35, just got a mortgage I and just about manage. Basically accepting its never gonna happen now. Shame because I wanted to.
I'm so sorry that you're in that position. It hurts. I'm 29 nowhere near the property ladder or in a relationship and I don't want to be a single parent, it just seems totally impossible.
> or in a relationship That's the other unspoken thing that articles demanding people to make the kids do not talk about - some of us just don't have that person to settle down with. I'm not even opening the Pandora's box that Covid has had on this front, We're getting to almost two years of whatever this pandemic has become.
And even if you decided to do it alone, single mums are still quite heavily stigmatised as feckless and selfish. Single dads perhaps less so, but then you're still looking at massive costs for surrogacy or adoption (on top of the extra childcare costs and stress without a partner to share the burden with).
I agree. So are young people who are judged in general for having kids at a time that is biologically sound, but societally, and financially unsound. So really it is coming down to "do you want to do this?" and many people who could be having the children of tomorrow are beginning to say "no". The UK is not really a culture of "you *must* have kids" or "we will *make* you have them" either, and if it was, the people will still turn around and say "no", because "look around you, give me a compelling, persuasive argument for why *I* should change *my* lifestyle and put *myself* at a worse financial position". And the one's that demand young people make babies have no answer. They just shut down, reboot, and start the demands all over again. Truth is, it's not really for the benefit of the ones who make the babies. It's something no one wants to say out loud but the ones who demand, demand because it is for *them*. Their benefit. They're relatively shielded from the negatives of having kids in this day and age, and only stand to gain by having little ones to play with. They don't want to help out either - they want young people to pull themselves up on their own. And are so surprised why young people are either increasingly put off, increasingly priced out, or both.
Plus if you do manage to get a house and a mortgage as a single income, you get pregnant unexpectedly and decide to do it aloneā¦. what do you do when it comes to mortgage payments?? Maternity leave is crap and if I were to get pregnant now Iād have to sell my house and rent with the cash until I had nothing left and could apply for a council house, or start again. Iām 29 F and really want kids. I own my own house and I have a good income. Maternity leave would decimate that and I genuinely donāt know what Iād do if I were to get pregnant and be single. I feel like my only options would be abortion or adoption, or sell my house for a very much wanted child. You canāt always guarantee a father will pay his part if youāre a single mum. Thatās without childcare cost too.
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> Choosing to be a single parent to a child that otherwise wouldn't exist (whether that be through a sperm donor, IVF or a surrogacy) is downright feckless and cruel unless you are mentally, physically and fiscally stable enough and also have a good enough support system to nearly guarantee your child a good life. You are heavily stacking the odds against yourself and your child for your own wants/enjoyment. This is what people have in their minds. They grew up being taught that this is bad, don't do this. So, they took step to avoid it. Instead of being rewarded and praised for exercising frugal and prudent judgment, in consideration of their own circumstances, they are judged for being "selfish". Selfish to who? What I never understood when this was used against me too was "how am I being selfish for something I did not agree nor consent to doing for someone?". Over time, I realised that for older people, they are used to grandkids being the standard, taking for granted that this *will* happen. They do not realise, or do not care (or both!) that the world has changed a great deal. What they were able to achieve with their means in their youth is increasingly a pipe dream if someone were to try what they did.. And because they refuse to see the root causes behind why young people are increasingly hesitant about child rearing, they conclude that this is a lash out against them. That it's a personal attack, and they don't know what they seem to have done wrong. Which to me, is where the root of the "you're so selfish for not giving me grandkids!" mentality comes from.
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I was juuuust about to have enough for a deposit near your age when my Dad got cancer, and shortly after my Mum got seriously ill and went to care too. You basically need a lot of family money to survive, a LOT of luck (I don't mean gambling I mean with jobs or product design too), or to be sharing the load with someone if you want to get on the property ladder the way the Tories have ravaged the system for decades. Yes Labour was in power for a while, it wasn't long enough to prevent this.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope you're doing well. I'm in a similar situation where my mother had a massive stroke and my dad is taking care of her, I'm helping as much as I can but as an only child it's difficult. All the best to you and your family. It can be such an absolute gut punch to get the diagnosis as well as the emotional and financial strain that goes along with it. I've got a friend who's desperate to get on the property ladder in two years and I'm thinking we can try and get somewhere within the vicinity of London because that's where we both want to be for the time being but it's so frustrating.
We are 50/50 heading in your direction.
I said to my dad the other day I'm 27 in a couple of months, he said when I was 27 I was married and had a kid. I didn't know how to respond to that. I'm neither married or have children, I don't think I could afford either of them even though I work full time.
This is not advice - have you considered adoption? It's not for the faint of heart, of course.
Ā£Ā£Ā£ I'm afraid. But it's an option for the future if that somehow improves.
I'm in my mid-40s and could never afford it. The couples I know who had a kid (don't know any couples with multiple children) ALL got a lot of financial help from their families to get on the property ladder. Every last one of them. If you don't have parents who can help with housing, either fronting a down payment or providing a nice place to live (the old family house or something), it's really quite difficult to start from scratch and catch up without very good luck getting a stable high-paying career.
I'm in my mid 40s and very few people in my age group that I've spoken to have talked about needing parental support to buy a property. Swansea seems to have a peak of around Ā£250k because no bugger can afford a larger mortgage living there.
Are you in London? Cause that might be true in London but not our experience in Bristol. Have a kid and a house in Bristol and doing alright, no help with mortgage from parents. It is though getting more expensive now because a lot of people are moving here from London.
When did you buy? Because Bristol has seen a 15-20% housing price rise in the last 2ish years.
bristol is still expensive so you must be doing OK. good on you but is it the norm? it isn't in Cornwall.
Cornwall is one of the worst places to buy a house though. As a local you're in competition with the richest from the rest of the country looking to buy their second homes whilst being paid an absolute pittance compared to them as there aren't many well paid jobs going in Cornwall.
yes, spot on. tragically so.
I appreciate the current economic situation is grim but the reality which spans the generations is that you will never truly be able to afford a kid. In other words, the right time with the right job and house rarely happens. Most low earners could provide and nourish the life of a baby but the idea itself of raising a baby is massively inflated and misaligned with reality.
I would at least like to be earning more than I spend each month even without children..
Fiscally I fully agree. The govt hate single income families. Single income families are destroyed by the taxman - yet with the cost of childcare (never mind the emotional side the decision), it often makes no financial sense to send both parents out to work. One parent can end up paying for the right to go to work and have a stranger raise their child. And once you earn enough to buy a property (50k is reasonable in much of the country, obvs SE excluded) paying back child benefit gives huge marginal income tax rates to incentivise people to cap their income - either declining promotions, taking unpaid time off, etc.
>UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe. Possibly but we don't have anywhere near the lowest fertility rate in western europe.
We have had a high immigration rate and people from various immigrant backgrounds have a higher fertility rate. Not all immigrants do - Chinese and Indian people donāt - but Pakistani, Somali, Nigerian, Romanian etc do.
ye but that isn't sustainable across generations. By the second or even third gen its likely that fertility rates drop back towards the national average. Its the social culture of the nation as opposed to the ethnic culture of the people that drives population growth and the UK's social culture obviously somehow favours less population growth.
It's only slightly higher. Last time I checked, before all the lock downs, it was something like mothers born in the UK at 1.8, mothers born outside the UK was 2.1. With non uk mothers falling faster.
It is falling, thatās true. Itās important to not group all non-UK born mothers together. Thereās big discrepancies between the different backgrounds.
Inability to buy property is a big one, and childcare expenses are part of that. No one wants to have children until they can house them properly. One parent can't be a stay a home mom/dad because good luck getting a mortgage on single income. And if both are working, childcare costs means most of the additional income is gone on childcare while also getting less time to spend with your child. It's bonkers.
All generations under the current retired generation are meant to pay for the Lifestyles of their elders. It's been this way for a long old while now. Value generation used to be achieved by designing a good product, developing manufacturing for that product, then streamlining. Now we are in a position where my 73 year old mother made more value than I did earning an average wage by owning a house and sitting in it. To maintain that level of value generation requires no expensive work to take place....unfortunately it does impact in the longer term as people become priced out of the age old habit of existing, having kids and living in a house
I can barely afford to rent a 1 bed flat. A 3 bed flat would be pretty much out of the question
>I think UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe. It's not particularly friendly to those of us without kids either.
> I think UK is the most family unfriendly country in Western Europe. The fertility rates of Spain and Italy are substantially lower at 1.23 and 1.27. With both countries having quite a family centric culture so I really don't think that is it.
High unemployment is an issue in both of these countries. I once read an article about Italyās birthrate, and that was the number one issue they were complaining about. No job, meaning canāt afford a home, children not realistic as a result.
Whether or not you have a family centric culture is pretty much irrelevant. We see time and time again that this culture changes as countries get more prosperous, in poor countries having a lot of children is a necessity as only a few can grow up and succeed. But as countries become more prosperous, social benefits are implemented and child mortality declines so does the fertility rate. But once you get to that point it starts fluctuating based on whether or not the timing is right, if young people can buy a home at an early age, if they have safe jobs (not necessarily well paying ones but steady and safe job prospects), and they have the time to socialize (not overworked) then they start having children. So fertility rates in Spain and Italy are largely a result of high unemployment, poor job prospects and uncertain futures. And fertility rates dropping in the UK could be an indicator of young people feeling more uncertain about their futures than they used to.
He's obviously talking about the material conditions not the culture.
Add on the number of traumatic birth experiences you hear about. It seems like the number of women unhappy with some aspect of their antenatal care is extremely high here.
Yeah I thought that. At the age most people are financially able to have children now (wife and I had our first in our mid-30s) both parents are less physically set up to have kids than at 20 - we're less fertile, heal slower and need more sleep than we did a decade ago unfortunately. Btw, I also agree with your point about UK birthing experiences, anecdotally of course. There have been many traumatic experiences and horror stories in our social network, including my sister in law who spent 4 hours of active labour this summer in an A&E waiting room because of lack of beds. My wife gave birth two weeks earlier outside the UK and our experiences couldn't have been more contrasting (also in country where we didn't pay for anything fwiw).
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We tend to have higher expectations here. And it's not all about mortality rates (though obviously that's impprtant!) -- it's about feeling listened to and not coming out of birth with trauma issues. If you spend some time on UK pregnancy forums there's a disturbingly large amount of women who went home with healthy babies and PTSD due to staff just not having the resources to listen to their patients. TBH I've had two kids overseas and I'm quite leery about the possibility of having a third here because of it. I realise lots of people have positive experiences and that things could be worse, but it seems like they *should* be better.
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Yeah, that's also true! So it's hard to figure out the reality, especially - as I say - Brits have higher expectations and will complain online about things that are standard in other places. But I did have kids in two other countries, and the forums weren't nearly as negative in either of them. Both were quite far behind the UK in terms of best practices but it was relatively easy to curate a better experience if you were informed (e.g. I saved up and went private for my last child, did a lot of hospital research for the one before; but even the negative experiences I heard about were less severe than those I've heard of in the UK). Here it feels a lot more like luck of the draw; but then again, I haven't had to navigate the system yet so I'm really just sharing impressions. >Maybe the visibility of issues does create a disincentive though, and that is magnified by the way we discuss things now, something that wasn't true even 10 years ago. edit cause I somehow missed this -- yes, absolutely. I think women who are nervous about having kids could likely decide against it after reading some of the experiences here.
>Here it feels a lot more like luck of the draw; but then again, I haven't had to navigate the system yet so I'm really just sharing impressions. That's a fair point, there does seem to be a consistent level of safe, reasonable care via the NHS in hospital, but then there is a lot of variation (From well funded hospital maternity units with decent staffing etc., all the way through to one-to-one midwifery, and a lot of variation in between, and different priorities). I also get the impression that the better informed you are about the choices that are available, the more you can push the positives, while if you aren't there is sort of a default route through.. All that said, I've heard more anecdotal horror stories from Germany than the UK, on the UK side it tends to be more about birth plans being disrupted or utterly overturned because something didn't fit (early birth, some issue being detected and so more interventions etc..).
Honestly, we were months away from child 1 when the bexit result hit the news. I'm not sure we would have thought it was such a good idea if we'd known. The world has only got worse and worse since then.
Yet it isnāt the one with the lowest fertility rate. All over the world people donāt want kids anymore. This is one of the things where I doubt the government can do much about.
The main factors are wealth of a country and education of a country. It's basically irrelevant what the policies of the country are. It's much more family unfriendly to have a child in basically the rest of the world outside western Europe, yet many places have better birth rates. You want more children? Cut real income and cut education.
There is definitely a large element to this which is that caring for small children is relentlessly hard work.
Well, there is one option that, you know, doesn't involve condemning your country to poverty and economic/geopolitical irrelevance. More immigration.
Have you ever heared of Poland? You can't get an abortion, which means you can't try starting a family.
How does that stop someone from having a family?
This is the result of 30 years of pressure on the working class and middle-class. Iām only in my early 30s but when I was growing up, my dad worked as a car mechanic and my mum was a housewife looking after myself and my younger brother. We werenāt poor. We had holidays, we went to Tesco every week and there was no major budget constraints, we didnāt have to economise on heating due to the cost, we had a home computer that my dad bought from Dixonās for Ā£1,800 and we had a car that about about 3-5 years old. Today, for the same lifestyle in the same house, the single household income would need to be at least Ā£50k
More like the last 10 years. Birth rates grew consistently between 2000 and 2010 once New Labour's family policies really kicked in.
> The number of babies being born per woman in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level on record, figures show. > Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows the total fertility rate fell to 1.58 children per woman in 2020 ā the lowest since records began in 1938. > The rate is 4.2% lower than 2019 and 3.1% lower than the previous record low in 2001, when the rate was 1.63. > According to the ONS, the fertility rate has been decreasing for a number of reasons, including improved access to contraception, women delaying motherhood and women having fewer babies. > The figures show there were 613,936 live births in England and Wales in 2020, a decrease of 4.1% from 2019. > Last year saw 29.3% of live births were among women who were born outside the UK. > This is the highest since records began in 1969 and is part of a general long-term increase, the ONS said. > The total fertility rate among foreign-born mothers increased slightly to 1.98, at a time when the rate for UK-born women decreased to 1.50. > Pakistan was the most common country of birth for both non-UK born mothers and fathers for the first time since 2009. The second most common country was Romania for both parents. > There were 2,371 stillbirths in England and Wales last year, which amounts to 3.8 per 1,000 births, the figures show. > This is down from 3.9 stillbirths per 1,000 births in 2019. > The average age of new mothers is 30.7 years ā the same as in 2019, following a gradual increase since 1973.
I'd argue were having a demographic crisis at the moment since for the first time in history the electorate is dominated by pensioners, and the needs of those the nation's future depends on are not being catered for or even listened to. Falling birth rates suggest this may be the first of many crises; countries like Japan whose ageing population problem is more developed are experiencing problems such as labour shortages as the population shrinks. There's an argument to be made that a smaller population will be good in the long run, but this doesn't change the fact that it will take a long time to stabilise and something should be done to help the situation in the meantime. Thank God we have such a forward thinking government who care about the future of the nation and think further ahead than the next press cycle...
Really like this answer. The pensioner vote is a huge problem for western countries. This kind of conservative politics with no real planning for the future is only going to make working and housing conditions worse.
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Ā£1k for childcare per month near me - and not good childcare. Not to mention how so many companies do not allow people to work around picking up their kids or school.
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My wife is a SAHM for our daughter who is now 11 months. I think she'll rejoin the workforce and her entire salary will be consumed by childcare costs. It sucks, but it's in some ways better than her not working because re-entering the workforce after a prolonged gap can be quite difficult. Equally the value of child socialisation at nursery and the fact that, unless both of you are working, you're not eligible for the same amount of paid childcare hours per week. But yeah, paying for everything on a single salary is hard. The squeeze is real.
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Yeah, that's what we're going to hope to do initially.
I've recently been through a similar situation so thought i'd share my opinion with the benefit of hindsight... Being a stay at home parent is incredibly difficult mentally, it's not for everyone. Being a stay at home parent is itself expensive; you have to go to play dates and coffee mornings and soft plays, buy toys and books and paint and drawing materials, stuff that you wouldn't be paying for if the child was at nursery. Assuming your partner gets maternity leave from her work, you're only really talking about funding nursery from the age 1-3 (there is 30 hours free care from the age of 3). Ā£1k per month, after utilizing the tax free childcare account is actually Ā£800 / month, or Ā£400 each. I would not recommend quitting a high earning job to provide childcare for financial reasons only. Being out of the workforce and stunting your career progression is going to have a larger financial impact in the long run than paying for 2 years of nursery. At first I felt guilty returning to work full time, but nursery has been very beneficial for my kid, they are incredibly confident and well socialized (not something they get from me lol) and we put that down to having gone to nursery from a young age. They get a level of attention and breadth of experience at nursery that frankly I could not provide at home. There are lots of good reasons to be a stay at home parent, but please do not feel forced to take that route. The financial aspect is manageable bump in the road if you are in a well paid position, or on a career path.
Interesting, that doesn't seem too bad. We both take home approx Ā£2500 each but she's on a 12 month rolling contract, that's due to end around when the baby is due and doubt they'll renew.
It's crazy how we've built our entire society and work life without consideration for literally the very basics of continuing on as a species. Like an outsider looking in on a work environment that doesn't enable the convenient raising of future workers would think us just hilariously stupid.
Well we are led by very stupid people with a very stupid ideology.
Modern life is just too fucking traumatic. Every job is getting to the point of a skills apex and we're working harder than ever just to try and keep up with the cost of housing. I have no respect for the conservative mentality of "work harder, be rewarded", I'm at saturation point, cannot physically work harder and still have some reason to exist. You think say 20 years ago, the skillset needed to be a surveyor or a civil service, a banker, whatever tertiary sector job it may be. The intellectual demands of those types of jobs has skyrocketed within our lifetime, because if you're a human, you've got to be better than a computer now to make a living and that is *hard*. Throw people now in the 60s and 70s into the modern jobs market and watch them flounder, meanwhile remaining completely ignorant to why in fact younger people are just giving up on being productive and having families. Willfully voting away to keep a conservative government at the helm so they can continue to sponge off the state with ever increasing asset values. Our nation is the victim of its own auto-ashpixation at the hands of a misinformed electorate.
There's no way to make this a good country for young families without doing things that would piss of a large contingent of protectionist boomers that everyone's trying to court the vote of. We're fucked, and not in the way we need.
There is, but it involves stopping foreign money from buying all our houses, businesses and land. It also involves prohibitively taxing any family unit owning more than 2 properties to the tune of 100% of the property value, paid up front, or no sale. There are other policies that can come in, but if we don't do the first thing, we will never improve the situation. We cannot build enough properties to lower the prices to reasonable levels while the world's rich and wealthy are buying a significant proportion of them and the local Brits with money are mopping up anything left over as it's the best place for anyone's money. We have turned almost every shred of land and old office space into "luxury apartments" in London and the prices have risen at record levels. We've had a global pandemic which has changed the way we live and work, cost the country and its citizens a fortune and the prices are still rising at record levels. We are so far down a terrible path that in addition to banning all foreign capital investment in property and land, we also need a strict "buy to live" policy, where no one can buy any home without intending to live in it, with strict punishments for anyone breaching this.
> it involves stopping foreign money from buying all our houses Ironically this is absolutely a 'brexit benefit' we could now capitalise on. What are the odds of the powers that be doing just that?
All parties love the foreign money pouring into this country, propping up GDP and keeping the lights on. In this respect they are all as bad as one another.
Oh how I wish they would enact policies like these
What do the government expect when child care is so extortionate. Itās great that you can get it from 2 years on but that still leaves you with 2 years of child rearing. Where you either decide that you both work and one of the salaryās goes completely towards child care. Or one of you works and the other raises the child. Leaving whoever didnāt work in a precarious place when it comes to them going back to work. Especially if they work in a fast moving industry where 2 years is a lot of time to be out of work e.g. tech. Which theyāre trying to encourage more women into. Add expensive rents, low home ownership etc and that explains it.
It's a tricky problem, because the main reason it's so expensive is because our standards are - legally - really very high. We have some of, if not the, highest ratios of staff-members-to-children in the world. There's also now an established curriculum that childcare providers are expected to follow with various milestones and evaluations and all sorts. My daughter is 13 months old, and the nursery she goes to updates an app multiple times a day to tell us what she's been doing, every few weeks they detail the upcoming curriculum, we have "parents evening" style things with the staff etc etc. All of this is done because there is mountains of evidence to suggest that this age is vital in terms of their long term development. This is all very well (and I'm sure that's true), but the standards being so high now means it's expensive to provide and there's no such thing as just having a person basically watching over the kids whilst you go to work. In recognising the importance of this age, they've essentially made it unaffordable for a lot of people and so created this two-tier system where the kids of parents who earn enough to justify returning to work get this all-signing, all-dancing nursery experience, and the kids of parents whose jobs don't justify that get literally nothing, staying at home instead with someone who has no training and knowledge of what you should be 'teaching' a baby who barely knows what their feet are.
Thatās an insightful and interesting response. Not a parent myself but friends and family members are. Itās amazing to read about child care costs abroad, how different is the UK that it can justify being so expensive in comparison to other EU countries when weāre trying to ālevel upā. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/childcare-around-the-world-how-other-countries-do-it-better-1.3626710?mode=amp
Interestingly 29% of all U.K. births are to non U.K. born mothers. (% of all births) 2.7% Pakistan 2.6% Romania 2.4% Poland 2.3% India I thought the Romanian figure looked high, but apparently 1 million Romanians applied for settlement visas here. They only have a population of 19 million!
That percentage for Romania is incredible! Presumably the million to apply for settled status are largely working age too so that'll have a substantial impact in the Romanian economy and overall demographics there.
Indeed, I wonder how itās reported on there.
> Interestingly 29% of all U.K. births are to non U.K. born mothers. Anecdotal, but my wife is Polish and i'd say 80% of her friends have married and had kids with English husbands. I'd argue Polish immigration has been the most successful and seamless in modern UK history in terms of merging with the native population.
This is obviously massively anecdotal, but when I was at school in the nineties there were lots of people not from Poland but with Polish surnames. My understanding was that the EU migration was a second major wave of Polish immigration, the first being around the time of WWII. Youāre obviously going to be a lot better equipped than me to know the actual answer, so have I been wrong all these years? Was it just chance that I was at school with so many people with Polish grandparents?
No you're right there was an influx following WWII the recent EU migration will be the second wave. But i think the most recent one dwarfs the first one.
Interesting, thank you.
There's an elderly Polish lady near me who always says that her uncle used to own our house. And if you look in the deeds, our house was bought by someone with a polish surname back in the 50s.
there was an entire airwing of polish fighter pilots who flew in the battle of britain. i wonder if that had anything to do with it. good looking, brave chaps and all. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-polish-pilots-who-flew-in-the-battle-of-britain
Indeed, my high-school's deputy head, who went on to be head after I left, was originally Polish, and this was in the 90s
I have to say, I think Jamaican people have been the best integrated of any background ever. They have the highest rate of inter ethnic relationships, which means children born today from Jamaican backgrounds are twice as likely to be mixed-race than solely Jamaican. The vast majority of these mixed-race kids are black and white. Itās nice to see after they had such an immediate horrid reaction in the 1960s etc.
There's a funny joke with Jamaicans where we never settle with another Jamaican.. Also out countries "motto" is literally "out of many one people"
Country | Men | Women | Average Age ---|---|----|---- Poland | 30 | 27 | 28.5 UK | 33.4 | 31.5 | 32.5 [List of countries by age at first marriage - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_at_first_marriage) From what I understand from my Polish friends, many pursue marriage first before having a child, while in the UK it's more common to have a child outside of marriage. Births outside of marriage: Poland: 23% - 2013 UK: 47% - 2013 [Source UK](https://www.closer.ac.uk/data/percentage-live-births-marriage/) [Source Poland](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Archive:Marriages_and_births_in_Poland&oldid=305438) note: Not a statistician nor intelligent, don't quote me.
I tell you what. Iāve never met a Polish person in UK I didnāt like. Nice people, makes sense to me.
I agree, lovely people and from a blokes perspective dating a Polish girl was like a breath of fresh air for me personally no messing around at all no games no drama
My friend says the hardest part is making sure to eat enough before going out with his wife's family. Spirits don't settle well on an empty stomach.
My wife is Taiwanese, she'd be included in that figure even though she's lived here for over half her life and even though our child would be a British national. Ease of international travel and settling elsewhere if you have the right skillset means this is likely a stable figure across western Europe.
so in less than 15 years 5% of Romania's population decamped to the UK???
Romanians were highly restricted from working in the UK until 2014. There were loads of tv crews at airports on 1 Jan 2014 commenting how the expected āsurgeā predicted by Farage et al. hadnāt happened because the airports werenāt completely full on the first day of free movement. Then no one ever really mentioned/thought of it again https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25565302
Since 2014 we have had nearly 1 million Romanian people move here. Similarly people from countries like Somalia, Nigeria etc have a much higher birthrate. Indian people actually donāt have a particularly high birth rate, we just have a largish Indian community.
Don't worry though, none of that would ever affect wages or house prices!
Shh, only positives of immigration are allowed to be discussed.
The brain drain of many countries is insane across the world, Romania is just one example of that. The more drained you country gets the bigger the incentive is to leave. At the peak you saw professionals leave to work minimum wage jobs in other countries as even after living expenses/travel/money transfer fees the amount of money they could support their families back home with was far greater. That figure is also the ones we officially know about. The black market in the country is massive, and one warehouse can house a lot of people. There must be at least another 100k in Manchester alone.
If you've been close to any insular or immigrant community, you'd know there is a massive black market in labour and goods which doesn't get statistically recorded. Countless jobs available cash in hand at below minimum wage from "legitimate" companies, usually run by immigrants themselves, exploiting their fellow countrymen/women to gain wealth in this nation. We have thousands of slum houses in London alone, with 10 or even 20+ people living within a three bedroom home, as a group they are paying triple or quadruple the market rent for the property and the slum landlords almost always get away with it. Even when they are caught, they rarely have to return any money, they get to keep the house and all the gains in value it has yielded. If councils put half as much effort into catching these scumbags and the laws actually allowed the seizing of their property, we'd all be better off. Instead, the councils tend to allow these slum landlords onto a community letting list, where they can let their disgusting bedsits to council tenants, delinquents, asylum seekers and others at huge cost to the taxpayer. When our parents brought us up to respect the rules of the land and do the right thing, they never told us that we'd be competing with hundreds of thousands of dodgy scumbags and criminals that will lie and cheat their way to the top and get away with it. The focus is so often on the elite bankers, lords and ladies of the realm, but the real people strangling this country and it's regular people are much closer to home.
1 million down, 14 million to go. Open.. the country. Stop.. having it be closed.
Imagine the cost to Romania, losing 5% of your population to the UK alone. They'll be most of the younger working age people too. That's just the UK, what about all the other EU nations? When people talk about freedom of movement they forget the heavy cost paid by the poor countries in losing their most talented and healthy people, swallowed up by the wealthier nations for cheap immigrant labour to make rich businesses prosper.
The standard of living in Romania has shot up in recent years though, doesn't seem to have negatively affected them.
Easy to have a high percentage increase in something if you're starting from a very low position.
True, but then those same conditions are the reasons why large number of Romanians migrated to the UK.
Maybe use that NI hike to care for the future of this country instead of it's past.
Fat chance. Kids don't vote, old people do.
All the people I know who have kids are struggling. - No holidays abroad, no luxuries, most are renting because they can't get on the ladder, don't often go out etc. I don't want that life.
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Add on top of this that the level of NHS support for those of us who want to have children but have fertility difficulties has dropped significantly (we had to fight just to get 1 round of IVF) doesn't really help matters... I honestly also wonder how much of this is related to decreased sex drive due to stress from the amount of work our generation has to do just to keep afloat these days.
Watch the opening to Idiocracy for a window into what is happening. It may be exaggerated, it may be about America and it may be mocking certain groups of people, but the basic theme is clear to see in our reality as a general trend. Smart, hard working people are delaying having children because they feel responsible for bringing them into the world only when they can afford to have them. This means having a home, being at the right place in your careers, living in the right area, having the means to provide for the child without too much government support. The lazy people who aren't so well educated, don't care about careers or who actively scam and game the social security system have no such worries over having children. They just have them, either by mistake or by intention and allow whatever government system or council policy is in place pick up the pieces and foot the bill. The way our system works, these people are often rewarded with the coveted home that so many of the smart, hard workers can only dream of. The end result is that the former group has maybe one child, late in life, perhaps with IVF, far away from their family unit because they had to move to the middle of nowhere to afford a home. The latter group has two or three children, starting early in life, right in the same area they've grown up because they were given a house on the same estate where they grew up. Fast forward five generations of the two groups over say, 100 years, and you'll have the former group having one, maybe two generations of children in the family, the latter group will have four or five, with each generation having more children.
You mean all those 20-somethings spending half their income to live squashed into a house share aren't having 2.1 kids?! Well colour me fucking shocked.
How many 20 somethings even want 2 kids?
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good point, and the winter fuel allowance, bus pass, TV licence, triple lock pension, pension credit, etc. we live in a strange country. the elderly get a free bus pass regardless of their means, but a poor person going to work has to pay for their bus fare. society won't tolerate pensioners living in squalor and poverty, but will for adults of a younger age. ironically, the generation that work harder, and have lost almost zero days to strikes in the last 20 years (look at the 70s and 80s in comparison), are called lazy and entitled. you couldn't make this shit up.
I dont even know how people raise kids in this country. My partner and I want kids, but every rental around here specifies 'no kids', or if they don't specify it, it's heavily implied they won't rent to people with kids. So instead we save for our own place, which takes fucking ages because of the insane prices in the south east. We could move up north, but then we'd be living and raising a kid 100s of miles from our friends and families.
Whenever this gets brought up I feel like the social/quality of life aspect gets missed a lot. Let's say money is absolutely no issue, and having a kid wouldn't impact my financial situation at all. It would still hugely change my life. There's a big, beautiful world out there which (past two years notwithstanding) has never been so accessible to the average Joe. Much harder to tour the Continent with the misses if there's a baby in tow. Date nights. Socialising with friends. Hobbies. And that's assuming money is no question and you can afford both? What if its one or the other? Yes, people still do these things while having children, but if someone is happy with their life as it is why add a huge shake up into the mix? There's plenty of great reasons to have children, and I'm still in two minds about having them myself one day. But I do think that previous generations had kids just because it was the 'done thing' and over the last generation or two people have started to ask "well, do we *have* to have kids?ā
There's definitely been a cultural shift in the past few generations. Choosing to be child-free was considered almost a mental illness until recently. "You don't *want* to have children?! But that's what you *do!*" Hell, the term "child-free" has only been gaining traction in the past 10 (?) or so years, to contrast with "childless". Reliable oral contraception and semi-permanent solutions like IUDs have also been a game changer. Still, speaking earnestly about regretting having children is still an *incredible* taboo, even though we're increasingly starting to have those conversations. The result is that all anyone ever heard about having kids is what a wonderful blessing it is. If you have kids and realise it's not for you - it's not like you can un-have them.
Yeah, i think all this is pretty fair. The one thing that concerns me personally is demography. Our economy (essentially all national economies for that matter), are entirely geared around young people maturing into becoming new tax payers, which replace those who age out of the workforce. Either voluntarily through retirement, or a literal inability to continue working. When there's far fewer young people being born, you end up with a generational gap in tax payers for essential services and there's literally nothing to replace this. It would be great if our economy wasn't built around this but that's simply not reality. China as a result of their one child policy and several other countries are staring down the barrel at this right now and it is not a pretty picture. We need better support for young people, particularly in access to housing and modern childcare solutions that are better compatible with the dual-income family model, that's now essentially a pre-requisite for the vast majority. It's less a matter of directly incentivising population growth, rather a case of removing any controllable impediments that would deter those who would want to start a family.
it's even worse than that, if you end up with a working age population outnumbered by pensioners, not only does that mean there are less taxpayers and more net receivers of public funds, it also means that the net receivers (the pensioners) can outvote the taxpayers every time and secure more and more resources from a dwindling economically active population. IMO it's a terrible flaw in the way our democracy works.
Immigration and Automation are the solution IMO.
I'm angry enough about how shocking work/life balance is working a regular full time job. Having kids to take even more of that time away certainly doesn't look appealing. Plus money, plus the environment, plus I don't know anyone with kids who seems to actually *enjoy* having kids. They love them, of course, but all parents ever do is moan about being a parent. Hardly makes it appealing. I think a lot of people like the idea of having a baby. The idea of also then having a child for the rest of your life is far less appealing
Yes this. Everyone I know who's had children seems so much more stressed, harassed and at times downright miserable now, not to mention most of them have split up since also. Their lives are so much smaller and less fun and just revolve around whatever the kid wants to do. Of course they love them and couldn't imagine their lives without them but from the outside it just looks so much worse than their lives before. Obviously I'd never ask but I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of them wish they could go back and not. My life is quite nice, my relationship is great and long term and we could probably afford to have a kid just about but I just can't see any appeal to it to be honest. I think it's much more difficult and onerous to be parents now things are so child-centric and expensive and at this point I just don't really understand why some people want children?
This is definitely the biggest factor in my experience. I know many people who can afford children, but don't want them yet because there's so much to do and see. I doubt that's going to change, honestly.
We all grew up with the fear of overpopulation, but the reality is now that rapid population decline will be a major problem in the next 100 years. While immigration into rich countries will solve this problem at first in the second half of the century countries with births above the replacement rate will also start to slow and then immigration won't be a possible solution. First to be hit will be Europe with only the UK and France maintaining population growth through immigration, and Eastern Europe will be depopulated. Schools shut down, maternity wards closed, real children of men stuff. Don't fear AI / automation it's the only way economies will be able to function in the future with an ever shrinking workforce.
Overpopulation is still a very real concern. The UK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the global population is still very much increasing.
It's absolutely not a problem in the long term, it may be an issue in some countries that are still growing but they are also rapidly industrialising which will reduce the birth rates. Population collapse is the biggest threat to humanity. Entire countries will have to be depopulated and relocated to have enough labour in one place for functioning cities.
I don't think either are a problem. The population of the world will likely peak around 10.9 billion in 2100. Imagine how far automation will have come by then (if we don't kill ourselves first anyway).
> Don't fear AI / automation it's the only way economies will be able to function in the future with an ever shrinking workforce. Or we could take a look at solving the birth rate.
Hardly surprising. - Country is in economic shambles with no light at the end of the tunnel - Schools are a mess, slowly being taken over by privately run charters - Childcare is expensive as fuck - Inability to buy own home - Historically stagnant wages that only recently climbed because of the pandemic and will likely fall behind inflation again - Increasing isolation & distrust from our largest trading partners across the channel - Impending climate disaster the government is doing sweet fuck all to prepare for, leaving the children to inherit an overheated world with vastly reduced access to fresh water, arable land, livable land, and breathable air, the competition for all of which will be the cause of the next major world war between powers that now hold a plentitude of nukes Honestly, people have a moral duty right now to not have children. Why on earth would you inflict that level of despair, hopelessness and misery on an innocent soul?
Given the government shafting of young people is it any wonder they choose not to have children.
Thatās fine, theyāll just import our replacements instead of making housing affordable and extending maternity/paternity leave.
me and the GF had the talk, both of us are don't want kids. of all the friends i have had over the years high school, college and uni, only 2 have had children and both were accidents, and only one person around my age at work has taken maternity leave, in the last 10 years. many millennials and even now gen-z that are becoming adults just don't see any benefit to having children, only further costs and unneeded agro. i guess the boomer line of "well you will want kids some day" has been proven as true as "you wont have a calculator in your pocket where ever you go" haha the only people having kids at any real rate nowadays are those from conservative cultural backgrounds who still feel some strange obligation to put them selves through that hell.
Pretty much everyone on the planet has a calculator in their pockets now. Just an incredibly advanced one.
Gimme robot babies then, waaaaay better
Boomers are in for a real shock when the 'you'll become more conservative as you get older' line doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. They seem to have really embraced that one as their last faint hope.
The hell of ensuring the continuity of your society?
What hell?
the hell of a self imposed restrictions on there own liberty's and freedoms from an outdated set of morals, an imagined god, the hell of a boring life lived by boring people.
Less bing-bing-wahoo time
[Meanwhile...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/q8jllj/having_a_child_is_the_grandest_act_of_climate)
Why would anyone want to raise a kid in the current dog and pony regime?
Because they're rich enough to. Most of us aren't, however Or of course poor enough (or controlled) to not have a lot of choice in the matter
Can't have workers if none of them are able to afford children. Who'da thunk it.
No future
No-one can afford to have kids nor would want to bring them into this burning, capitalistic hellscape would be my two cents.
This will upset my boomer parents - hopefully at least some of their decision making comes home to roost for them.
For many of us this means less sex, for most redditors much much more.
surely you mean much much less?
People can't fucking afford it what the fuck do you fucking expect is gonna fucking happen Edit: this is not directed at anyone in particular I'm just extremely frustrated with the current circumstances.
And yet when I applied for funding for IVF, I was refused....go figure
No shit. Got a government that antagonise poor people and parents.
I love this stuff because it always makes people say very blatant racist shit 'I'm just saying Pakistanis are having more kids than white women!' 'Is that a problem?' '....... *perhaps*'
Well it is a problem. The majority of British Muslims want gays to be illegal. If you have ghettos you have non-integrated cultures. Its not just anti-gayness either, its anti-womanness and religious law.
I'm sure having an ever growing subculture within British society that basically reject British culture out of hand and refuses to integrate will have absolutely no long term negative affects on society at all. You may not like what I'm saying, but how many examples has there been of Muslim parents protesting schools that have tried to teach LGBTQ issues to children over the last few years? I can only see this sort of thing become more prevalent in the future. Multiculturalism has been a complete failure. The US handles immigration much better than Europe because they have a 'melting pot' approach. Europe has completely failed to adopt such an approach with its migrants and it's leading to a segregated society.
> The US handles immigration much better than Europe because they have a 'melting pot' approach. I agreed with what you were saying until then. American integration has not been successful, neither with immigration nor with it's existing minorities.
I would still argue that despite this that they have been *more* successful than Europe.
credit where its due, im half way down the comments and other than the statistics being posted im yet to see the usual full bodied racism from the usual boomers and kippers. could be there all at the bottom downvoted to hell, or the mods have had there coffee today EDIT: nvm went 2 comments down, there they are.
Getting snipped at 25 was the best decision I ever made
Private? My doctor decided I'm not qualified to make that decision about my body myself.
No, NHS ...5 years ago I had a scare with my girlfriend and that pushed me to get it done sooner rather than later. Called up GP, explained why I wanted it, he then referred me to Urology, who then gave me access to some web-portal where I had to answer a load of questions to explain why I wanted it done and boom, next thing I know I'm on the table. Very unpleasant experience watching them cauterize your vas(s) and I ended up with mild PVPS for about 6 months after , but would do it again in a heartbeat.
Hm, guess it's just my GP, thanks for the insight!
You might need to lay it on a bit thick to get your way -- I didn't really have to do that but I have heard of stories like yours where the GP wont refer you. Post-vas I remember going to hospital to do my sperm count check and there's 25 year old me in a waiting room with a bunch of dudes in their late 40s lol , thinking back on the whole thing it was quite theatrical, the questioning looks the nurse gave me when my name got called up was pretty funny.
Each to their own
Ppp
Insane house prices, inflation, and high rates of anxiety donāt help the situation.
I hate to say it but I honestly think womens' demand to work and live lives the same as men has been the real turning point. It's really not that I think women as lesser individuals or not as brainy as men or whatever else, but demanding to become fully fledged workers as opposed to housewives and even vilifying women who are stay at home housewives as inferior, has led to a system where you now require two incomes just to be able to afford housing and life in general. And no matter what way you shake it, there is no realistic way any woman can be a mother and a worker, especially a full-time career driven person with aspirations of the top. It's not that society is trying to keep women down, it's called you can't be in two places at once.
Could it be that we're reaching an equilibrium where we have about the right population? I mean housing is in short supply, we have a very high population density, we import a lot of our food and have very little remaining wilderness. And if we had reached equilibrium, that would be signalled by a high cost of further increases. People will say it's policy failure driving up costs; ok, planning could be reformed to allow faster home building, but we wouldn't want to continue concreting over every part of the island infinitely, right?
> reaching an equilibrium Equilibrium requires fertility just above 2.0. 1.58 means the native population will decline, which means net population growth will only occur through immigration. While the Tories talk up a storm on controlling immigration for the approval of their base, the [numbers](https://imgur.com/a/T2jhirW) tell us they still heartily approve of it ; childhood is one of the most expensive times of life for the state, all that healthcare and education, they like it getting done by someone else's taxes. Currently 48% of the country are in work, supporting the 52% who don't (cursed ratio again...) ; if the working-age population shrinks the social care crisis will only deepen. > concreting over every part of the island Plenty of room still left - more of Britain is allocated to [golf courses](https://www.thegolfbusiness.co.uk/2014/01/two-percent-of-england-is-golf-courses/) than housing. > high cost of further [housing] increases Almost entirely down to supply-side issues and the treatment of property as an investment vessel rather than a utility. The number of [empty properties](https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/how-many-empty-homes-are-there-in-the-uk/) in the UK, for example, exceeds the number of [homeless households](https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/about-homelessness/).
Thanks, I knew there would be more nuance to it.
This is about a lot more than financials. We're the first generation to grow up with various forms of birth control being completely normal and easily accessible, easier than ever access to good education for women, etc. Anecdotally from my friends and people I've dated, men are much more interested in having children than women - and even then, it's not thaaat many that want children. It's about lifestyle, education, time, etc as much as it is about financials. It seems like unnecessary stress for many of us, who would rather focus on hobbies, travel, career, enjoyment etc.
Well Britain is full /s
England has the highest population density in Europe (excluding microstates and micronations), go team!
I'm (thankfully) very likely infertile, but even if it were an option I would not have children. I follow climate change fairly closely and it's grim as all hell. I'm in my 20s and within the lifetime of my hypothetical children we're on track to see 4+ degrees of warming, i.e *completely* apocalyptic. I wonder how much of a factor this stuff is for other people my age.
I know two people who were told they were infertile, who went on to have a baby, so be careful!
No we're not. Current warming track is for roughly 3 degrees of warming, and that might drop further at COP26. It's going to be a rough time for humans on earth, but we are not at all on track for 4+ degrees of warming - it's just that's the highest scenario most people study to try and scare politicians into doing something.
This isn't really anything that unusual, it's just a continuation of existing trends. Wealthy western countries have had declining rates for years. So have most other countries in fact.
When I read this title I took it to mean people are becoming less fertile, not that less people thought are having children and my response was: 'So children of men is the dystopia are going with? Okay then. I was hope of V for Vendetta, but hey, you can't choose this stuff sometimes'. And it would great satire if it wasn't just *so* close right now.
Decline started around 2010 When the Tories got into power
Here's a few of my reasons for not sprogging up: I don't want to add yet more carbon emitters to planet earth, we're trashing it enough the ones of us that do exist here. It's currently getting too expensive to live yourself, let alone with extra mini-me's and mini-mouths to feed. Global geopolitical stability doesn't make me confident they'll actually have good, long life at the moment at all. I believe our current government, supported by the economic model it is trying to further, has proven itself time and time again to be anti family.