* Scotland’s population is aging, so there are less people who can have children
* Having children is expensive and millennials have not had the opportunity to earn as much or accumulate as much wealth as previous generations. Those that are having children are doing so later.
Im not surprised, building a family while renting is basically a non starter for a lot of people. Let alone while also dealing with the 10% reduction in real term wages being faced by so many.
Then you have to think about caring for a baby, with tighter wallets, both parents rightly wanting to have a career and ever rising costs of every day stuff let alone child care.
This is a massive timebomb that is going off and without serious long term and massive investment into childcare services and support its just going to get worse.
Childcare ends up costing just as much or more than what your rent/mortgage would be, combined with people moving about from work they might not have a family support nearby for childcare, plus older people having to work longer so they can’t look after the grand kids etc means less babies.
The FM won’t care. He is in favour of just importing new people.
Wages are crap, disposable income is constantly under strain, childcare is extortionate, work life balance is abysmal, many rent, the planet is circling the drain, and there’s just a lot of people who don’t want kids
Is it any surprise
I get the cost of living and house ownership arguments
But then think of your grandparents generation – they were all popping out 4 or 5 kids while living in abject poverty
There’s also been a massive change in societal preferences and lifestyle trends
You mean harassing new parents with unscheduled visits for months after birth and an unmitigated cost of living crisis don’t serve as great incentives to have children? Ya don’t say…
Really not surprised. Definitely 50/50 within my social group. I doubt I’ll be having another as well.
Hardly a surprise. Modern society is not built for having a family. For most people, to be able to buy a family sized home and maintain a good quality of life, they need two good incomes. So the choice isn’t so much kids/no-kids but poverty/no-poverty. And, for many, the two income model is only sustainable by using grandparents as unpaid help. Which many don’t have, or want, as an option.
Personally I’d rather live fairly affluently without my parents back in my life. There’s a bit of me that is sad about not having kids. But there’s a bigger part of me happy that I’m financially stable and independent.
Is Scotland unusual in this. Strongly suspect similar numbers in other UK countries and the EU.
> *I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.*
We pay more per month for childcare than for our mortgage, a mortgage which is likely going to nearly double when we remortgage in 6 months.
Then when you factor in inflation on literally everything the past two years, working couples literally can’t afford to have families. I’m surprised it’s only a 7.5% drop.
Even when I was studying statistics in university in the 90s, we knew about declining birth rates. The trend was noticed in the 1960s. To be clear, it’s not the decline of birth rates that has become an issue, that’s been going on for over 50 years now. It’s that we’re running out of working age adults and adults that are of the ideal age to be parents without the higher risks of complications. Now that is a feedback loop that has been going on for 30 years. It’s too late to fix this. At worse, some ethnicities will disappear. At best, it will stabilise over time (although there is no indication of that).
We don’t know the exact causes for this. If you point out economics, I can point to another country in the map that has either better or worse economics than our country, with different outcomes. Same with population density, health systems etc. The strongest correlation we had was religiosity and the education level of women. But even that had oddities and nuances. What this means is we can’t really predict trends and that it is harder to find solutions. What people outside the field of demography do is take the last 20 years of data and assume that the trend will continue. This is in no way accurate, it could get worse or better. But let me state this simply. A country without children has no future.
All this is worse for Scotland because in addition to this, we are also one of the unhealthiest countries in the West. Heart disease, drug addiction and alcoholism amongst the top contributors. We also suffer from a massive brain drain, where our best and brightest seek better opportunities elsewhere, either down south or some other part of the world. I don’t see a way out of this.
Is Scotland really that bad? Minimum wage us going to go up to £11.44 and there are many places where rent is about £800 a month. If you have 2 earners paying you’re not living to bad and you get a decent amount. And that’s on the bare minimum if you have a better hirer salary job you’re fine. Not sure what the issue is?
Where as in Ireland you’re paying like €1200 a month to just get buy and minimum wage is like €12 Euros.
People are having less babies cause we don’t have the Catholic Church and religion pushed down our throats. Plus things overall are going up for sure living costs are getting up there and people are planning their future and don’t see children in it. Plus women don’t want the pain and suffering of child birth its insanely grueling and many women are capable of making choices and not having men tell them what they will or will not do. It’d a social change that is happening all over the world not just in Scotland.
It’s ok, we will just import people from the 3rd world to balance the population books, that’s the best idea western governments have come up with so far, rather than encouraging the people who are already here to have more children through incentives, a reduction in the cost of living or making it realistic for low earners to support a family we just kick the can down the road.
If you think the NHS is unsustainable just now wait till you see it in a society with demographics resembling Japan.
Increasing immigration, including a large focus by the SNP on asylum and refugees which will take up more of our limited housing stock, while working jobs that pay little tax, does absolutely nothing to help our housing supply for native people to encourage families to have births.
The idea of people my age (early twenties) ever owning a home is almost laughable and more and more of us are still living at home with their parents because they simply cannot afford to live anywhere else, not exactly the best spot to be starting a family. We can barely financially support ourselves never mind a family.
I would consider myself in a realitively fortunate position for my age where I’m able to live realitively comfortably in my own home (edited: rented not owned to be clear) but that’s only because I work a full time job as well as having a decent paying side gig but even then I still wouldn’t be able to afford to have a family even if I had the time too.
/rubs hands
Time to scroll to the downvotes comments and see the white replacement crackpots whinging. Nature is truly amazing.
Just waiting for Humza to introduce this free childcare for all like he promised. Any time now…
We did our part but even having one is soooo expensive. Can’t imagine how sore I’ll be once we start paying for nursery xD
Only reason we could even think about it is because we’re not renting and it still took years of saving to get to a point where I don’t feel we’ll go bankrupt.
Need to give people more money and get shagging
Humza actually had a good idea to help with this by subsidising childcare… seems to have gone quiet on that since rUK implemented that policy though 🤔.
In the meantime SNP are taxing workers more heavily alongside the burden of childcare.
Any actual strategy to tackle this issue?
That’s because we’ve had to look at Sturgeon’s ugly mug all that time and it’s put us all off.
Who me? Shagger?
Prima noctus.
Believe it or not, all the evidence suggests that the birth rate declines as quality of life improves
Take a look around the world, and at at our own history, for confirmation of this
Similarly, it’s usually new immigrants, starting out at the very bottom of society, that have the highest birth rates in developed nations
And the SNP seem to think the solution is to import infinity immigrants. Which would increase rents/property yields even further, likely decreasing property sizes AND suppress wages.
aka a big part of the reason why ppl aged 25-40 now DON’T want to have children
it might have something to do with how awkward and bereft of social skill this generation is. The below article is from 2019, I am guessing that Covid and lockdowns caused further problems.
I would love to have kids but it’s not even vaguely affordable for me right now, this is a huge factor on why people aren’t having as many kids. If we manage to open access to affordable housing and increase of wages you’ll see the birth rate rise.
Need to do what Hungary have done, significant tax breaks for having kids
Simply too bloody expensive to feed yer mouth these days, never mind adding mair mouths!
Well they’ve been shutting all the pubs by putting up the prices of a pint so high is it any wonder?
Housing too expensive, childcare too expensive, wages too low and obviously the answer is not to fix any of this but to import masses of people from the 2nd and 3rd world. I’m sure that’ll do the trick.
This is our extinction. Brought to you by the capitalists class. Their quarterly profits were more important than a sustainable country.
34 comments
* Scotland’s population is aging, so there are less people who can have children
* Having children is expensive and millennials have not had the opportunity to earn as much or accumulate as much wealth as previous generations. Those that are having children are doing so later.
Im not surprised, building a family while renting is basically a non starter for a lot of people. Let alone while also dealing with the 10% reduction in real term wages being faced by so many.
Then you have to think about caring for a baby, with tighter wallets, both parents rightly wanting to have a career and ever rising costs of every day stuff let alone child care.
This is a massive timebomb that is going off and without serious long term and massive investment into childcare services and support its just going to get worse.
Childcare ends up costing just as much or more than what your rent/mortgage would be, combined with people moving about from work they might not have a family support nearby for childcare, plus older people having to work longer so they can’t look after the grand kids etc means less babies.
The FM won’t care. He is in favour of just importing new people.
Wages are crap, disposable income is constantly under strain, childcare is extortionate, work life balance is abysmal, many rent, the planet is circling the drain, and there’s just a lot of people who don’t want kids
Is it any surprise
I get the cost of living and house ownership arguments
But then think of your grandparents generation – they were all popping out 4 or 5 kids while living in abject poverty
There’s also been a massive change in societal preferences and lifestyle trends
You mean harassing new parents with unscheduled visits for months after birth and an unmitigated cost of living crisis don’t serve as great incentives to have children? Ya don’t say…
Really not surprised. Definitely 50/50 within my social group. I doubt I’ll be having another as well.
Hardly a surprise. Modern society is not built for having a family. For most people, to be able to buy a family sized home and maintain a good quality of life, they need two good incomes. So the choice isn’t so much kids/no-kids but poverty/no-poverty. And, for many, the two income model is only sustainable by using grandparents as unpaid help. Which many don’t have, or want, as an option.
Personally I’d rather live fairly affluently without my parents back in my life. There’s a bit of me that is sad about not having kids. But there’s a bigger part of me happy that I’m financially stable and independent.
Is Scotland unusual in this. Strongly suspect similar numbers in other UK countries and the EU.
> *I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.*
We pay more per month for childcare than for our mortgage, a mortgage which is likely going to nearly double when we remortgage in 6 months.
Then when you factor in inflation on literally everything the past two years, working couples literally can’t afford to have families. I’m surprised it’s only a 7.5% drop.
Even when I was studying statistics in university in the 90s, we knew about declining birth rates. The trend was noticed in the 1960s. To be clear, it’s not the decline of birth rates that has become an issue, that’s been going on for over 50 years now. It’s that we’re running out of working age adults and adults that are of the ideal age to be parents without the higher risks of complications. Now that is a feedback loop that has been going on for 30 years. It’s too late to fix this. At worse, some ethnicities will disappear. At best, it will stabilise over time (although there is no indication of that).
We don’t know the exact causes for this. If you point out economics, I can point to another country in the map that has either better or worse economics than our country, with different outcomes. Same with population density, health systems etc. The strongest correlation we had was religiosity and the education level of women. But even that had oddities and nuances. What this means is we can’t really predict trends and that it is harder to find solutions. What people outside the field of demography do is take the last 20 years of data and assume that the trend will continue. This is in no way accurate, it could get worse or better. But let me state this simply. A country without children has no future.
All this is worse for Scotland because in addition to this, we are also one of the unhealthiest countries in the West. Heart disease, drug addiction and alcoholism amongst the top contributors. We also suffer from a massive brain drain, where our best and brightest seek better opportunities elsewhere, either down south or some other part of the world. I don’t see a way out of this.
Is Scotland really that bad? Minimum wage us going to go up to £11.44 and there are many places where rent is about £800 a month. If you have 2 earners paying you’re not living to bad and you get a decent amount. And that’s on the bare minimum if you have a better hirer salary job you’re fine. Not sure what the issue is?
Where as in Ireland you’re paying like €1200 a month to just get buy and minimum wage is like €12 Euros.
People are having less babies cause we don’t have the Catholic Church and religion pushed down our throats. Plus things overall are going up for sure living costs are getting up there and people are planning their future and don’t see children in it. Plus women don’t want the pain and suffering of child birth its insanely grueling and many women are capable of making choices and not having men tell them what they will or will not do. It’d a social change that is happening all over the world not just in Scotland.
It’s ok, we will just import people from the 3rd world to balance the population books, that’s the best idea western governments have come up with so far, rather than encouraging the people who are already here to have more children through incentives, a reduction in the cost of living or making it realistic for low earners to support a family we just kick the can down the road.
If you think the NHS is unsustainable just now wait till you see it in a society with demographics resembling Japan.
Increasing immigration, including a large focus by the SNP on asylum and refugees which will take up more of our limited housing stock, while working jobs that pay little tax, does absolutely nothing to help our housing supply for native people to encourage families to have births.
The idea of people my age (early twenties) ever owning a home is almost laughable and more and more of us are still living at home with their parents because they simply cannot afford to live anywhere else, not exactly the best spot to be starting a family. We can barely financially support ourselves never mind a family.
I would consider myself in a realitively fortunate position for my age where I’m able to live realitively comfortably in my own home (edited: rented not owned to be clear) but that’s only because I work a full time job as well as having a decent paying side gig but even then I still wouldn’t be able to afford to have a family even if I had the time too.
/rubs hands
Time to scroll to the downvotes comments and see the white replacement crackpots whinging. Nature is truly amazing.
Just waiting for Humza to introduce this free childcare for all like he promised. Any time now…
We did our part but even having one is soooo expensive. Can’t imagine how sore I’ll be once we start paying for nursery xD
Only reason we could even think about it is because we’re not renting and it still took years of saving to get to a point where I don’t feel we’ll go bankrupt.
Need to give people more money and get shagging
Humza actually had a good idea to help with this by subsidising childcare… seems to have gone quiet on that since rUK implemented that policy though 🤔.
In the meantime SNP are taxing workers more heavily alongside the burden of childcare.
Any actual strategy to tackle this issue?
That’s because we’ve had to look at Sturgeon’s ugly mug all that time and it’s put us all off.
Who me? Shagger?
Prima noctus.
Believe it or not, all the evidence suggests that the birth rate declines as quality of life improves
Take a look around the world, and at at our own history, for confirmation of this
Similarly, it’s usually new immigrants, starting out at the very bottom of society, that have the highest birth rates in developed nations
And the SNP seem to think the solution is to import infinity immigrants. Which would increase rents/property yields even further, likely decreasing property sizes AND suppress wages.
aka a big part of the reason why ppl aged 25-40 now DON’T want to have children
it might have something to do with how awkward and bereft of social skill this generation is. The below article is from 2019, I am guessing that Covid and lockdowns caused further problems.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48184848.amp
The boys have nae patter nowadays
I would love to have kids but it’s not even vaguely affordable for me right now, this is a huge factor on why people aren’t having as many kids. If we manage to open access to affordable housing and increase of wages you’ll see the birth rate rise.
Need to do what Hungary have done, significant tax breaks for having kids
Simply too bloody expensive to feed yer mouth these days, never mind adding mair mouths!
Well they’ve been shutting all the pubs by putting up the prices of a pint so high is it any wonder?
Housing too expensive, childcare too expensive, wages too low and obviously the answer is not to fix any of this but to import masses of people from the 2nd and 3rd world. I’m sure that’ll do the trick.
This is our extinction. Brought to you by the capitalists class. Their quarterly profits were more important than a sustainable country.
Quick, import some refugees!