Young women having fewer children and having them later in life, ONS says
https://www.mylondon.news/news/uk-world-news/young-women-having-fewer-children-31334723
by alyaaz
Young women having fewer children and having them later in life, ONS says
https://www.mylondon.news/news/uk-world-news/young-women-having-fewer-children-31334723
by alyaaz
44 comments
Average monthly childcare cost here is now almost 1k per month and we don’t get subsidised childcare in NI either.
No wonder people are holding off.
There are zero incentives to have children young, most young people are not financially stable at all
Housing insecurity and high cost of living. Hardly a shock people are not having kids
Why would you have a kid under 30 if you can’t even afford a house?
Where would you keep it – in your houseshare bedroom or at your parents’?
The other factor is that you can’t survive on a single income now, so both parties have to work. Cost of childcare. Cost of living in general.
And the gov keep housing prices and rent high for the young, wages low so they can serve their elderly landlords better. (85% of property value in the uk is owned by 55+ demographic)
Young workers can’t afford children so don’t have them.
Then the gov then import cheap labour when asked by multinational corporations to keep wages low in place of our own population having children.
Truly dystopic.
Governments and super-rich “wow I’m shocked less people are having kids in a bad economy”
Tax avoidance & evasion. Using loopholes and offshore accounts to pay less tax.
Low wages & zero-hour contracts. Keeping wages low while profits rise.
Wealth hoarding. Accumulating assets without reinvesting in society.
Property speculation. Driving up house prices and rents.
Underfunding public services. Cutting healthcare, education, and welfare.
Lobbying & political influence. Shaping laws to benefit the wealthy
All to keep inequality high and people unhappy and poor. Low birth rate is the consequence of a bad and unfair political and economic system that helps the rich and punishes the poor.
My dad was able to get a mortgage and start a family on a security guard salary in the late 70’s.
There is absolutely no way a normal working couple can afford those things today.
Anyone surprised?
Cost of living is bad enough on your own and sometimes with a partner. Bringing a kid in makes it all the more worse.
If wages weren’t wank and everything wasn’t so dreadfully overpriced you might not have this issue.
The tax setup that a single earner supporting a family gets punished is also very very unfair and does not help this situation. A single earner family should be rewarded with tax incentives.
Until they make having children more affordable then there will be less people having them
Pay us more then, you fucks? I’d love a child but both my partner and I work gruelling jobs full time and are renting, we have neither the time nor the money.
Hmm I wonder why, perhaps because it’s career suicide, and scraping by in life now requires minimum two people working full time, and childcare costs are £1000+ a month per child?
Around 30 years ago my Mum had four children as a single parent while working part time to pay off a mortgage and studying for a degree (for free). Her house cost about 40,000. It’s now worth nearly £700,000. None of her adult children, even one working a very high paid job with no children, could afford to buy the house from her today. If by some miracle they were simply handed a deposit for the house, they could not afford the mortgage and the childcare costs of a single child. Never mind 4.
Women generally are assumed to be the primary childcarer and home maker, on top of working. Why would you sign up for this?
I pay £500 a month, just for extra curricular activities for my children. I can’t see how younger people are supposed to pay for childcare, extras and living expenses, as well as trying to find somewhere to live. Why would they have children, we have squeezed everyone.
rent, bills, and child support take about 110% of my salary every month.
i have been living outta my savings, and they have begun to dwindle. i work full time and can’t afford to eat.
people are waiting longer to have fewer children because it isn’t financially feasible.
Make having children affordable, and life more enjoyable, for the general population as we’re all stressed out our tits trying to make ends meet we have no time or energy for just the sex part, let alone the results of it…
Who’d of thought that years of sustained attacks on ‘benefit thieving single mothers’ and ‘scum benefit family has 3 kids’ would make women fearful of having kids without being absolutely financially secure which takes longer and some just not even bothering,
The only way to change this would be more social housing. This would free up more money so one parent can afford to stay home and not pay exorbitant child minding fees.
It would also have the added bonus of saturating the property rental market so private rents would go down too.
There’s no way the current government would do this though. Corbyn might have.
This issue is not just the UK, pretty much most of the 1st world countries are having children later
Society where large chunks in supposed decent careers cannot afford to realistically own a home or have any real job security decide adding kids to the mix might not be a great idea.
More as we get it.
8 billion+ plus humans already on the planet, that number dropping really isn’t a bad thing.
The world is fucked and you’re surprised people don’t want to bring anymore children into it?
Work doesn’t pay enough for most people to have children.
Not a surprise that, most of the women in my office tend to be mid 30s when they’re going on maternity leave for the first time
Not having children the end. Too expensive and a financial burden, id love to have to, but when your already living hand to mouth in this terrible country i wouldn’t want to bring a child up into poverty. Its not fair on children.
But the national survival wage has just gone up !!! There’s simply no excuse now. You can have all the kids you could ever want……
Seriously though, is this really a surprise? Responsible adults are electing not to have kids due to the costs being so damn high. I genuinely feel sorry for people that want to have kids but the option is being taken away from them since they can barely afford to live themselves.
You have absolute clowns like Elon Musk worried about the declining birth rate, which is caused because people can’t afford to have kids… which is caused by people like him avoiding paying tax and consequently widening wealth inequality.
You can’t make it up. The people causing the issues in modern society are the ones crying about them. They’re the fucking problem, to begin with.
So this is the actual crisis, our demographics are terrifying, we have a growing elderly population and collapsing birth rates. It’s likely the thing that drives all the mainstream parties into encouraging immigration but it’s not spoken about much at all.
The UK needs to be talking about our demographics but we are largely silent on the issue. It’s actually a very strange thing.
Maybe it’s because we can’t afford homes, having a child will ruin the career we need to try and afford homes, and we had it drilled into us for our entire adolescence that having a baby was a moral failing?
I remember the late 90’s early 00’s when teenage pregnancy was the talking point. Now they’re not having them quick enough. Is there an allowable period of time that women won’t be judged for?
Great that they kept their young age late in to life!
The birth rate is below replacement now so it’s up to the government if it wants to help people have kids in the UK or we need to ‘fund the boats’ to get more immigrants.
I don’t blame them. Fuel prices are ridiculous. Mortgage, electricity bill and food costs. I definetly do not want any kids till I’m financially secure myself.
Childcare, housing and healthcare (yes the NHS exists but if you want a specialist you have to go private) all conspire to make parenting untenable until you’re really in your 30’s.
Wow who would’ve thought higher cost of living would lead to this. Total shock
Could it be the cost of the child and childcare. Negbit must young people aren’t fucking that’s the problem.
-health minister
There are many who simply can’t afford to start a family. Jobs don’t pay enough and the cost of housing and childcare are extortionate. I have no desire to have children but if I did it would only be in the last few years where I was in a position in my life and career where it would even be a possibility and still then it would be a struggle.
If you can’t afford to have children then ultimately I believe it is selfish to have them.
These headlines always crack me up.
The media spent DECADES along with the government (See tories) yelling at young people, calling them every name under the sun, for having the audacity to reproduce at a younger age thereby supposedly being irresponsible for not considering the financial implications, for being reckless, for adding to the taxpayer burden in terms of education, childcare, etc (despite what they add when they are grown).
So now young people have wizened up to the environmental issues and have stopped having kids in large enough numbers to keep the population stable, focused on their careers, waited tirelessly until they are financially stable (unlikely to happen but still), and stared into the abyss of environmental concerns like the political and climate crisis that is ever brewing harder deciding to dodge the bullet…
and all the old people can do is scream like harpes and say “fuck your finances and ability to eat, we want grandkids”.
Shocking… Definitely can’t think of any reason why this might be the case
Won’t this result in something like Japan or Korea have going on? Where there are way less young people to replace the ageing population
Of course.
To buy a house, two incomes are often required so couples are having to both work to get on the housing ladder.
One of them stepping away or down from work reduces income so it is put off till later.
Starting to have children later in life will mean less children overall at the population level.
Women having fewer children is a symptom as a bigger problem, not the problem itself.
People can’t afford the basics nowadays! My grandfather bought a house in Surrey and he was the sole wage earner. I looked up the address to check the house price and it’s well over £600k now.
Hell, I’m worried that I won’t be able to afford RENT as utilities have all gone up.
Everyone’s talking about money, rent and bills but failed to mentioned that a lot of us just don’t want them? Only recently it became ok to not have kids because you might prefer it so.
I have a high salary, my own 3 bed house, good health etc but I 100% will not be having kids. Fuck that noise.
*gestures broadly at low wages and high cost of everything*
Is anyone really surprised by this?
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