As someone in what you would call normal parenting age, I just think it’s a ridiculous idea to have kids at the moment.
My partner and I both have decent graduate jobs, and even with that we’d be majorly skint pretty much until they can stop needing childcare so at least a decade.
Probably going to wait until our mid thirties and take stock and if costs are still as high just write the idea off.
I think people are finally starting to realise that children are annoying.
This seems to ignore the elephant in the room: housing costs.
Having children is far less appealing when you’re always broke from high rental costs, or living in insecure housing because you can’t afford to buy your own place and get get evicted at any time, or you’re still living at home.
People are going to cope as they usually do and put it down to purely economical reasons because to even talk about cultural one’s is to controversial.
I’m a millennial and after, like most of us, tumbling my way through “once in a lifetime” event after event and watching the real-time social, environmental and economic decay of this country, I’ve pretty much accepted at this stage that the only children I’m ever going to have is my ever-expanding houseplant collection.
Speaking of, anybody have a begonia maculata or philodendron melanochrysum cutting they wanna send me? 👀
Why do they say “fertility” when our fertility is fine. We are choosing not to have children because of housing, affordability, lack of affordable childcare, lack of mental healthcare and other social support and investment in children’s lives, overcrowded class sizes with burning out and under-resourced educators….and so on
So we made it so that you need a degree, most of the time, to get into a decent career; and then the first several years of that job are still precarious and badly paid so no one can afford to start a family at that age; and then we made houses stupidly expensive so you need two incomes to afford the mortgage; and as a cherry on the top, added some of the most expensive childcare in the world, which there’s no hope of paying alongside that mortgage. If you intentionally tried, you could hardly better engineer a situation to discourage people from having children. It’s certainly not a trend that will reverse anytime soon.
Me and my partner both want 3 kids, but have agreed that without some financial security, we’ll be DINK’s. If we don’t earn well, or have a home, then we won’t have children. It’s shit, but it’s reality.
We can fix this with literally a handful of tweaks to legislation in planning, tax traps, childcare, and pensions (no more triple lock) but we just won’t…
As soon as childcare costs are > 1 single income, it becomes more economical for one parent (usually the woman) to stay at home.
The choice otherwise is to basically bust your backside for negative pay each day.
Add on top of that the housing crisis and it’s not surprising people are simply deciding not to bother having kids.
And then *the generation who voted for all of this* complain when the country needs a high level of immigration to fill jobs.
When to people have to work full time pay the morgage or rent and just survive you know the country is fucked.
If you want a more optimistic look on these findings the decrease can be attributed to the increasing availability of contraceptives to younger people and education about sex in school, which would mainly drive teenage pregnancy down. This as well as more babies surviving would lead to less babies being had overall.
Also fertility is a weird way to put the headline, since it would lead some people to believe less woman are able to get pregnant, not that less babies are being had.
I have two kids. But they were both born well before 2010.
If I hadn’t had any by 2010, I wouldn’t have any now.
Nothing to do with fertility, everything to do with the appalling right wing set up we now have to endure.
To me, there really is fuck all worth living for for the baby pleb. And I’m talking basically anyone who has to work for a living, as a pleb.
People will just bury their head in the sand. But it’s happening.
It’s the food, when you get fed microplastic from birth its bound to effect your body. Same with the hormones pumped into animals, antibiotics, pesticides on the crops, and the rest. Its happening all over the world.
Is it ‘fertility’ or is society slowly collapsing?
Look at the landscape, on all the levels mentioned by others here. It’s all going to crap, it’s not a good world to bring a child into unless you’re very well off or very poor, to claim benefits.
We’re heading into ‘idiocracy’ territory here with all the systems meant to support society almost completely eroded. Policing, schooling, healthcare, cost of living, inflation… how’s all that going?
Good times.
Another factor could be that people my age (early 30s) have realised that not having kids is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice, so do not feel the same pressure our parents and grandparents did to start a family. If you want kids then awesome but I think there are a fair few people like me who were raised by a parent (or parents) who had kids out of obligation and not because they really wanted them. Either that or their parents liked the idea of kids more than the reality. That sort of upbringing can really impact you and kids deserve better than that. Those of us brought up that way have realised that and chosen to break the cycle because not having kids is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Hands up, how many of you would like to live and bring your children up on a council estate?
If you can’t afford to live and have somehwere to live you don’t have babies. “Shock intensifies”
If anyone gives you shit for not having kids, just tell them that you’re doing it for their benefit; your kid would take opportunities away from theirs, and you’ve made a selfless sacrifice for their sake.
So vilifying teenage mothers may have been a mistake? Strangely, the same people tell us that importing labour is now the solution to make up for it. Perhaps they’re wrong about that too?
Hate this misuse of the word ‘fertility’. This is not to do with fertility, this is birth rate.
A well, people moaned that there was too many people anyway, silver lining nobody on Reddit can afford to have them.
It’s not about fertility, it’s about people being so fucked over that they can’t start a family.. childcare costs, energy costs, food prices… “Stop buying coffee or you will never afford a house” fuck off Oxford researchers!
How have they measured people’s fertility? seems a bit invasive to go poking around up there
Based on people seeking fertility treatment maybe?
We can’t even afford to feed ourselves and pay our energy bills, why the fuck would anyone be voluntarily popping out kids right now?
Let me have a think to why this might be the case.
I think the most important thing though is childcare being the factor ignored. Countries with comprehensive childcare tend to have higher birth rates (Denmark, Sweden, France).
I do think that declining birthrate is an inevitability in industrialised countries but how you manage it depends on the country (France versus Japan).
Fertility or people are able to afford a big enough house/car,take time off for maternity leave, pay nursery fees, cut hours or pay for breakfast/after-school club, pay for holiday clubs, pay for the higher cost of holidays etc etc
People would happily have children if they could afford it. It’s been in a steep decline due to things like housing costs, cost of living, social services are crashing around us… Now that two parents need to work to even have a vague chance at affording a family is a big reason also.
Ahhh blame “fertility” rather than the unstable environment and the soaring costs surrounding having children. Still ignoring that heard of elephants in the room. the lower birth rate has its positives too don’t get me wrong but they really keep missing the point of why no one can/wants to have children.
Cost was a huge factor in us only have one one, that was a few years ago.
Now it’s probably the main factor outside some other medical reasons.
> According to the study, all women had fewer children and did so later in life than in previous decades, ‘The analysis finds a substantial decline in each education group, defined either by women’s parents’ education alone or by a woman’s own education relative to her parents’ education.’
Good thing. Women used to not have a choice but to give birth when you consider our grandmothers generation couldn’t open their own bank account, no- to limited job access, no contraception or abortion access.
This is a sign that women when given the choice don’t want that many children and in the past were forced to have kids. Willing to bet drops in women violence towards their own kids had dropped because the people who want kids are having kids
Surely it’s due to the economic crisis? Statistics must match that fertility peaks in boom years and drops during recessions (or near recession!)
“Decreasing fertility rates”
makes it sound like a medical problem
it’s really “can’t afford to have kids so we’re not”
which is an economic problem.
Unless they’re in your tubes checking if you’re ovulating every month they have no evidence of medical decrease in fertility.
Is it because people are getting erm, well, larger?
35 comments
As someone in what you would call normal parenting age, I just think it’s a ridiculous idea to have kids at the moment.
My partner and I both have decent graduate jobs, and even with that we’d be majorly skint pretty much until they can stop needing childcare so at least a decade.
Probably going to wait until our mid thirties and take stock and if costs are still as high just write the idea off.
I think people are finally starting to realise that children are annoying.
This seems to ignore the elephant in the room: housing costs.
Having children is far less appealing when you’re always broke from high rental costs, or living in insecure housing because you can’t afford to buy your own place and get get evicted at any time, or you’re still living at home.
People are going to cope as they usually do and put it down to purely economical reasons because to even talk about cultural one’s is to controversial.
I’m a millennial and after, like most of us, tumbling my way through “once in a lifetime” event after event and watching the real-time social, environmental and economic decay of this country, I’ve pretty much accepted at this stage that the only children I’m ever going to have is my ever-expanding houseplant collection.
Speaking of, anybody have a begonia maculata or philodendron melanochrysum cutting they wanna send me? 👀
Why do they say “fertility” when our fertility is fine. We are choosing not to have children because of housing, affordability, lack of affordable childcare, lack of mental healthcare and other social support and investment in children’s lives, overcrowded class sizes with burning out and under-resourced educators….and so on
So we made it so that you need a degree, most of the time, to get into a decent career; and then the first several years of that job are still precarious and badly paid so no one can afford to start a family at that age; and then we made houses stupidly expensive so you need two incomes to afford the mortgage; and as a cherry on the top, added some of the most expensive childcare in the world, which there’s no hope of paying alongside that mortgage. If you intentionally tried, you could hardly better engineer a situation to discourage people from having children. It’s certainly not a trend that will reverse anytime soon.
Me and my partner both want 3 kids, but have agreed that without some financial security, we’ll be DINK’s. If we don’t earn well, or have a home, then we won’t have children. It’s shit, but it’s reality.
We can fix this with literally a handful of tweaks to legislation in planning, tax traps, childcare, and pensions (no more triple lock) but we just won’t…
As soon as childcare costs are > 1 single income, it becomes more economical for one parent (usually the woman) to stay at home.
The choice otherwise is to basically bust your backside for negative pay each day.
Add on top of that the housing crisis and it’s not surprising people are simply deciding not to bother having kids.
And then *the generation who voted for all of this* complain when the country needs a high level of immigration to fill jobs.
[I’ve seen this film before](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/)
When to people have to work full time pay the morgage or rent and just survive you know the country is fucked.
If you want a more optimistic look on these findings the decrease can be attributed to the increasing availability of contraceptives to younger people and education about sex in school, which would mainly drive teenage pregnancy down. This as well as more babies surviving would lead to less babies being had overall.
Also fertility is a weird way to put the headline, since it would lead some people to believe less woman are able to get pregnant, not that less babies are being had.
I have two kids. But they were both born well before 2010.
If I hadn’t had any by 2010, I wouldn’t have any now.
Nothing to do with fertility, everything to do with the appalling right wing set up we now have to endure.
To me, there really is fuck all worth living for for the baby pleb. And I’m talking basically anyone who has to work for a living, as a pleb.
People will just bury their head in the sand. But it’s happening.
It’s the food, when you get fed microplastic from birth its bound to effect your body. Same with the hormones pumped into animals, antibiotics, pesticides on the crops, and the rest. Its happening all over the world.
Is it ‘fertility’ or is society slowly collapsing?
Look at the landscape, on all the levels mentioned by others here. It’s all going to crap, it’s not a good world to bring a child into unless you’re very well off or very poor, to claim benefits.
We’re heading into ‘idiocracy’ territory here with all the systems meant to support society almost completely eroded. Policing, schooling, healthcare, cost of living, inflation… how’s all that going?
Good times.
Another factor could be that people my age (early 30s) have realised that not having kids is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice, so do not feel the same pressure our parents and grandparents did to start a family. If you want kids then awesome but I think there are a fair few people like me who were raised by a parent (or parents) who had kids out of obligation and not because they really wanted them. Either that or their parents liked the idea of kids more than the reality. That sort of upbringing can really impact you and kids deserve better than that. Those of us brought up that way have realised that and chosen to break the cycle because not having kids is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Hands up, how many of you would like to live and bring your children up on a council estate?
If you can’t afford to live and have somehwere to live you don’t have babies. “Shock intensifies”
If anyone gives you shit for not having kids, just tell them that you’re doing it for their benefit; your kid would take opportunities away from theirs, and you’ve made a selfless sacrifice for their sake.
So vilifying teenage mothers may have been a mistake? Strangely, the same people tell us that importing labour is now the solution to make up for it. Perhaps they’re wrong about that too?
Hate this misuse of the word ‘fertility’. This is not to do with fertility, this is birth rate.
A well, people moaned that there was too many people anyway, silver lining nobody on Reddit can afford to have them.
It’s not about fertility, it’s about people being so fucked over that they can’t start a family.. childcare costs, energy costs, food prices… “Stop buying coffee or you will never afford a house” fuck off Oxford researchers!
How have they measured people’s fertility? seems a bit invasive to go poking around up there
Based on people seeking fertility treatment maybe?
We can’t even afford to feed ourselves and pay our energy bills, why the fuck would anyone be voluntarily popping out kids right now?
Let me have a think to why this might be the case.
[Wages have stagnated for 15 years.](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/15-years-of-economic-stagnation-has-left-workers-across-britain-with-an-11000-a-year-lost-wages-gap/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20wage%20stagnation%20of%20the,left%20poorer%20households%20particularly%20exposed)
[House prices have gone up by 53% in the last 10 years.](https://24housing.co.uk/where-have-house-prices-changed-most-in-the-last-ten-years/#:~:text=Average%20house%20prices%20across%20Great,portal%20Rightmove%20in%20February%202022)
I think the most important thing though is childcare being the factor ignored. Countries with comprehensive childcare tend to have higher birth rates (Denmark, Sweden, France).
I do think that declining birthrate is an inevitability in industrialised countries but how you manage it depends on the country (France versus Japan).
Fertility or people are able to afford a big enough house/car,take time off for maternity leave, pay nursery fees, cut hours or pay for breakfast/after-school club, pay for holiday clubs, pay for the higher cost of holidays etc etc
People would happily have children if they could afford it. It’s been in a steep decline due to things like housing costs, cost of living, social services are crashing around us… Now that two parents need to work to even have a vague chance at affording a family is a big reason also.
Ahhh blame “fertility” rather than the unstable environment and the soaring costs surrounding having children. Still ignoring that heard of elephants in the room. the lower birth rate has its positives too don’t get me wrong but they really keep missing the point of why no one can/wants to have children.
Cost was a huge factor in us only have one one, that was a few years ago.
Now it’s probably the main factor outside some other medical reasons.
> According to the study, all women had fewer children and did so later in life than in previous decades, ‘The analysis finds a substantial decline in each education group, defined either by women’s parents’ education alone or by a woman’s own education relative to her parents’ education.’
Good thing. Women used to not have a choice but to give birth when you consider our grandmothers generation couldn’t open their own bank account, no- to limited job access, no contraception or abortion access.
This is a sign that women when given the choice don’t want that many children and in the past were forced to have kids. Willing to bet drops in women violence towards their own kids had dropped because the people who want kids are having kids
Surely it’s due to the economic crisis? Statistics must match that fertility peaks in boom years and drops during recessions (or near recession!)
“Decreasing fertility rates”
makes it sound like a medical problem
it’s really “can’t afford to have kids so we’re not”
which is an economic problem.
Unless they’re in your tubes checking if you’re ovulating every month they have no evidence of medical decrease in fertility.
Is it because people are getting erm, well, larger?