UK fertility rate drops by 18.8% in 12 years

The vast majority of taxes are paid by the highest earners. If we kept the highest earners and reduced the number of people who are a net drain on the public purse throughout their lives, we would all be a lot better off.

Yep housing and childcare cost is one of the main reasons we are "one and done".

Life has got very expensive and cost of living has especially skyrocketed in the past 3 years whilst our wages have unfortunately not. Currently our outgoings are slightly above our after tax income and eating into savings, (now little one has started reception I can get more hours so hope to break even soon) if we had another child we'd be totally fucked.

The expense. The people who can independently afford children have it all taken back in tax and removal of childcare allowance. Other countries subsidise childcare for all. We tax the shit out of decent earners and wonder why they stop having children.

You think the answer to that is keep having more and more children every year?

Crap nhs who would want to risk their own health in their hands on purpose..
Fertility - obviouely having kids later means some cant have them at all
No ivf postcode lottery so lucky to get 1 round so less than 1 dc. Plus waitlists

Having dc is harder than expected -
sen dc.
Years of swimming lessons at least 2y per child. - time and money

Money
Paying for parties £200 and then £10 per party to go to other kids
£100 christmas/birthday presents
Nearly £3 per day school lunch y3-13
£800 per year bus faire at secondary
School trips up to £400 for 2 day residential
Food/heating/nursery
If you go on holiday £500+ per child
Fines for taking kids out of sxhool (rightly)
Huge waitlists for anything nhs.

Issues if your kid doesnt cope with nursery and then before or after clubs

Anyway biggest issue is why do women want to take on all the cooking, cleaning, childcare, reading with dc. On top of working FT?

The main positives are xmas, birthdays, their achievements. But that would all be easier with just 1dc...

Just 2 kids
2x£3 a day lunchx190x11yrs=12540
£200 a yr partiesx5x2kids=£2000
£800 bus fayrex7x2kids=£11200
£1344 for learning to swim total
If paying for before after care
£15 a dayx2x190x7yrs£39900
£200 presents per yr per child x2x18 =so £7200
Uniform
£30x2x14yr school shoes=3600
£50x14yrs uniform =700
Its £25-50 per day per child for holiday club
So 25x2x7yrsxapprox 20days =7000
Say 500 per child holiday every 2yrs maybe 8000
Thats without expectation to pay for uni perhaps £5k/yr per child so £30k
(Scouts is £14 a month per child)

Its a lot and yes some optional, some would get tax free.
But i havent included any nursery costs.
Loss of pay on mat leave.
No normal food costs or clothes..
Really should be spending 20min a day reading with dc for reception - y3 say and then some help with spellings.

Nearly everyone i know did have 2 or more kids only 1-2 in my dc class are only kids.
In fact
1 --2 kids
2 --51 kids
3--- 3 kids
4 3 kids
5+. 1 kid

Other kid class

1. 2 kids
2. 51 kids
3. 6 kids

It is true these 4 kid families are almost all in council houses.

As well as the obvious financial stuff…

An ever growing cultural focus on the individual and doing what makes you happy, far more alternatives for what to do with your life (and visibility of alternatives through social media etc) and what might be called “selfishness” though I don’t mean that in necessarily a bad way. I know a couple of women of my parents generation who had kids because that was what you did, but who say if they were thirty-something now, with the opportunities they now see and with far better contraception, they’d never have had them. Certainly not 3/4/5.

Also the level of parenting expected now - I don’t have the emotional or physical energy for parenting a big family to today’s expectations. Parenting and children have become all encompassing. But I could have parented four the way my parents did in the 1980s - far less emotional input, far less child centric holidays or weekends, very few afterschool activities, kids piled into cars without seatbelts each in big carpool arrangements, we were allowed out unsupervised for hours, left in cars alone - my parents weren’t bad parents and we had a happy childhood but some of the things they did would get a safeguarding referral these days!

This is fantastic news, why on earth would we need to worry about reversing the trend?! 8 billion people on the planet not enough?! This is the best news for the planet.

I am also in my mid 20s and vast majority of my friends are not in committed relationships and still flat sharing even years after leaving uni / further education. I am in the minority as I have been with my DP for over two years and he owns a flat. We earn six figures combined and live in a cheap area, so realistically we could afford at least one child (likely two if we scrimped) but I want a promotion and have some more child free years before we have a family, so again it comes back to career.

The cost and the fact that our society doesn’t particularly value children or have much respect for mothers. Probably doesn’t make it desperately appealing.

It's a deliberate consequence of government policies designed specifically to stop women from having children/continuing unexpected pregnancies, the cost of housing, the cost of childcare and the attitude towards women being a waste of oxygen unless they're earning over average wages - add in the overwhelming awfulness of male behaviour towards women from about 10 years old onwards and it's no wonder that women are deciding that they aren't going to put themselves into that place of vulnerability and outright contempt.

Maybe it's people looking for perfection / a lot of fun in their lives, careers and partners instead of settling down with someone nice quickly.

Tbf, we’ve had the choice for several decades, @TTPDTS. I’m 50 and don’t know anyone who was married at 20 and only know one person in my age group who had their first child at 29-everyone else was 30+.

But housing was more affordable 20 years ago. I do think that finances are a big factor, plus, being childfree has become increasingly socially acceptable. It wasn’t unheard of for my generation, but less common. Now it’s not unusual at all.

It’s because all the men now think they are bloody women!

Birth rate is how many babies are born each year per thousand people. It's driven largely by the age distribution of the population - if you have lots of twenty-forty year olds and very few people aged 70 plus then you'll have a high birth rate.

Fertility rate is a calculation of how many children the average woman will have throughout her lifetime, and drives the long term population trends.

At one time I thought it was because the women who only had one child did it because they had an unhelpful partner. So they had one child, saw how difficult it was doing it all alone, and then decided not to add to the burden.

but the evidence is quite clear that what is rising, is the number of women having NO children.

The number of women having 3 or more children remains roughly the same.

Haven't RTFT so not sure if it's been mentioned, but another factor has to be the absolute state of modern dating in your 30s.

The good men are snapped up early and what's left is mostly dog shit, so more and more women stay single. 🤷‍♀️

Everyone assuming that the UK is uniquely terrible should have a close look at these graphs. The UK's fertility rate may be falling a bit faster than other countries but it's coming from a somewhat higher base and is still slightly higher than most of our European neighbours.

The thing is, if it's just cost/ financial, why does Sweden have an even lower birth rate than the UK? Honestly, I think it's more broadly socio-economic. Women don't want to be run ragged caring for 3+ children so are settling for 1 or 2. It's pretty relentless to have a career and a lot of children.

The research seems to suggest that a large number of women want to have more children than they end up having, so something, or many things, are making people miss out.

Cost. We couldn’t afford 2 close together and by the time DD started school we were far too old (and I mean literally-I’m 46 and going through menopause and DH is 51).

This !

14 years of Tory government made this country a depressing, hopeless place to live and Tory decisions massively increased the cost of living, while wages didn't rise to match. More recent global events make the world feel unstable and dangerous. Bringing a child that you can't afford into a scary, unstable, depressing world isn't appealing.