An Estonian entrepreneur and single mother explains why she moved to the UK with her two daughters – arguing that Estonia’s birth-rate crisis is really a crisis of priorities, equality and family life.
I am a single mother. Two years ago, I moved back to the United Kingdom, and I am now raising my two daughters in Cambridge. I had grown tired of the way Estonian society fails to value women and motherhood.
Every few months, the issue of birth rates crawls back into our national discourse, and every time the same faces appear in the media to discuss it: mostly older men, alongside women who dream of a world in which one parent – read: the mother – stays at home with the child for years. The articles and appeals have been essentially the same for years: a mixture of moral expectations placed on Estonian women, quotations from the constitution, demographic anxiety and a stupefying blindness to the conditions in which most Estonian families actually live.
Estonia already spends 2.3 per cent of its GDP on support for children and families, putting it at the top of the European Union. What it does not have is a rising fertility rate. You cannot buy babies with cash – Estonia ought to have understood this by now.
In Estonia, the role of mothers and women is so one-dimensional and constrained. I do not want to raise my daughters to become women in that kind of environment. Yes, I pay considerably more in taxes in the UK than I did in Estonia, and the UK is far from perfect. But problems are actively addressed, society is far more mature in the way it conducts debate, and the ability of families to cope matters.
A mother and child on the Estonian coast – an image of family life in a country still struggling to make mothers, children and everyday care feel fully valued. Photo by Aron Urb.
Estonia does not have a birth-rate problem. It has a priorities problem. The debate is dominated by people who have never had to choose between a mortgage payment and a childcare bill, nor chase child maintenance through an indifferent system. These voices diagnose a “crisis of national will”, failing to understand that what they are witnessing is a perfectly rational individual response to circumstances that make having children risky and socially thankless.
Let us begin with the living environment
No one in Estonia’s birth-rate debate talks about urban planning. Yet the physical environment of a city either supports family life or undermines it. For years, Tallinn has been moving in the wrong direction: the city is being shaped around cars and out-of-town retail, not children and families.
I chose to live in Cambridge because it is compact, safe and cycle-friendly. Outside several primary schools, streets are closed to cars in the mornings so that children can arrive safely. Cyclists share the road with cars, but drivers know how to take others into account, seek eye contact and give space. My children cycle at least 20 kilometres a week; we are healthier and more active than ever before. When I lived in Viimsi, on the outskirts of Tallinn, I spent an hour and a half each day commuting to and from work in the city. That adds up to 380 hours a year. I now spend that time with my children.
Cambridge, UK – compact, historic and cycle-friendly. Photo by Quan You Zhang / Unsplash.
There is something else that political debate fails to grasp: whether children are welcome in the local culture. During our first summer in the UK, my younger daughter asked why people smiled at her in the street. I explained that they were simply being friendly because she was a child. How sad that my daughter needed an explanation for basic warmth towards children in public space. Estonia’s birth-rate debate, conducted in a tone of anxiety and veiled reproach, completely ignores children’s living environment beyond the walls of the home.
A system that protects the weaker party
Domestic violence is a vast hidden problem in Estonia: 41% of women have experienced violence from a partner. The police and courts are not sufficiently trained to protect the weaker party, and the principle that children should be able to live in a violence-free home is not applied consistently enough.
One eye-opening case involved a local friend of mine here. She was able to submit an application to the court, and within 48 hours – including a hearing – her ex-husband was given a restraining order for an entire year, because the court recognised the thousands of harassing messages he had sent as a mechanism of control. The state stepped in to protect her and her children – the entire service was free – and built a legal wall around them. If he breached it, her ex-husband would face immediate arrest and probably imprisonment. In Estonia, the same woman would have been told to block him or change her number.
The statistics are brutal – if almost every second Estonian woman has experienced domestic violence, then that is not an environment, nor are these the kind of partners, with whom one starts a family.
Violence against women remains one of Estonia’s most painful hidden crises. Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash.
Maintenance debtors remain one of Estonia’s great disgraces. Even when child maintenance has been awarded and the parent is legally obliged to pay it, the state does not ensure that the money arrives, leaving children unprotected. The sums involved are, in turn, completely ridiculous, and it is easy to hide from them. In the UK, there is a state system that automatically deducts maintenance from the parent’s salary: 12 per cent for one child, 16 per cent for two children and 19 per cent for three or more children. Estonia is one of the world’s most advanced digital states – surely our Tax and Customs Board could manage this too, if only the political will existed.
The cultural layers of a world city
We live very close to London, and free world-class museums, parks and beautiful urban space are a 50-minute train ride away. A return ticket for a family of three costs €23. For that money in Estonia, we could not even travel from Tartu to Tallinn and back, let alone access the cultural layers of a global city. A child’s ticket to a London Symphony Orchestra family concert costs €6.90.
All prescription medicines are entirely free for children.
A London Symphony Orchestra family concert can cost less than a cinema ticket – a reminder that world-class culture in the UK is often made accessible to children and families. Photo: London Symphony Orchestra’s official Facebook page.
During school holidays, several local restaurant chains offer free meals for children. This is not presented as charity; it is simply normal, and it also helps families who are struggling to afford eating out. At the cinema, you do not have to buy an expensive bottle of water – every cinema will give you a cup of free tap water to take into the auditorium. All of this removes from parents the constant micromanagement, guilt and anxiety. You do not have to calculate, every time you open your wallet, whether giving your child an experience means cutting back on the food bill the following week. The message all this sends is clear: children and families are welcome here.
In Estonia, meanwhile, inequality is growing: the richest 5 per cent of households own almost half of the country’s wealth. At the same time, almost 40 per cent of Estonian single-parent households live in relative poverty. The indiscriminate distribution of social benefits will not fix this – support must be needs-based. When I lived in Estonia, I donated part of my child benefit to SOS Children’s Villages, because we did not need that money, while in the next street a single mother might have been weighing up whether to buy her child new shoes or pay the electricity bill.
A home of one’s own is crucial for young families. In the UK, it is possible to repay up to 10% of the principal on a mortgage each year without any contractual fees or penalties and without giving notice. In this way, a 30-year mortgage can become a 17-year one, with interest savings running into tens of thousands of euros.
In Estonia, however, every additional repayment requires the bank’s consent and weeks of advance notice – the process has been made so burdensome that most people simply give up. In addition, British banks do not punish families for every child they have – borrowing capacity for buying a home is calculated differently.
Homes in the UK, where mortgage rules can make it easier for young families to repay their loans faster and build long-term security. Photo by Ben Wicks / Unsplash.
This is a choice: young Estonian families or the income of Swedish banks – which matters more? Estonia’s system protects the banks.
The solutions exist
I am raising two daughters, and in Estonia I did not grow tired of the country itself, but of the narrowing I experienced there – a culture that leaves women less and less room. How can I raise my daughters in an environment where, at state level, the message is that women’s equal place in society does not matter?
The government’s recent message that it would rather pay fines to the European Union than implement the gender pay transparency directive is absurd. Meanwhile, women in the technology and financial sectors still earn almost a quarter less than men. This is our “new economy”, where women’s contribution continues to be treated as insignificant and where women are not particularly wanted in the circle of decision-makers.
Estonia has the widest gender pay gap in the EU, yet its government still treats pay transparency as an administrative burden. Photo by Mathieu Stern / Unsplash.
The British spend 25 per cent of GDP on social protection, and that support is needs-based. In Estonia, however, cash benefits and family policy have been confused with one another: the state spends indiscriminately on family allowances, while on every other form of social protection – schools, mental health, shelters – Estonia spends one of the smallest shares of its economy in the EU. Estonian women have understood that they will not simply give birth to babies for the fatherland in return for money – society must create the conditions for children to be born in a much broader sense than salaries and pension supplements alone.
The means to improve the situation already exist: needs-based benefits, an automatic child maintenance payment system, swift legal protection against domestic violence, and human-centred urban space. Estonian women must be included in the circle of decision-makers on every question concerning working life and families, with equal pay to match.
The question is whether the Estonian state considers women, children and families worthy of that effort. Today’s birth-rate statistics have provided a harsh answer. I gave mine by sparing my daughters – by choosing an environment where they are visible, welcome and valued.
The Estonian-language version of this opinion article was originally published in Eesti Ekspress. The opinions in this article are those of the author.