AIBU to think a big reason to birth rate is falling is because mothers are made to feel they must do more for their children than in previous times?

@Complet do you work full time & have young dc?

My DH is very hands on & great I have a job I like that pays well. I spend enough time with my dc but I struggle to juggle time with friends, wider family, with DH, myself & other hobbies. I just can't fit it all in.

A few generations ago, a mother would have thought they'd failed if their child wasn't sleeping through somewhere in the first four months or so. But there are parents in this generation, who are up all night with children over 12 months and marooned on the sofa by the same child who for some reason has been trained to sleep draped over the mother. Now, I know there is natural variation and so on, but babies haven't changed that much. My first took six weeks to sleep through - I mean not a solid night but say from midnight to 6 am - and the second took eight weeks - and they were hellish weeks. I just can't imagine keeping that up for a year or longer. Children were expected to fit in with the family rather than the whole family revolving round the child.

There was far less pressure to entertain children. Sure, we 'd have a few trips to the beach with an ice cream or go ice skating or maybe the local pool but they were fairly simple low cost things. There was less stuff on line and I grew up in a country with one television channel when I was a child and the prime time viewing was a program on agricultural news which often seemed to involve increasing the yield on your dairy herd or getting more wool off the sheep. We tended to follow our parents round so we learnt useful things like peeling vegetables, folding sheets, pegging out the washing and how to change a fuse, and adding stuff to the compost bin (which I refused to do after an encounter with a very large rat). Eating out was a treat and takeaways weren't that common.

It was a rare working mother when I was at primary school. Mothers might have been going mad with boredom but they weren't having to drag themselves out of the house at dawn to face a long commute. Children did walk to school - often a bunch of children from the same street might walk together. Parents weren't expected to be helping with school projects and drawing borders around homework pages.

I think we should meet, then you’ll know one woman who feels she has all those things!

I enjoy my job and am paid well. I have quality time with my family and I wouldn’t change a thing. My husband is caring, respectful, and loving. We share childcare/housework/mental load fairly and have no resentment or stress. I have time for me, I see my friends, and just generally enjoy my life!

I think house prices are definitely an issue but when I was growing up, and when I had kids, we didn’t have nice furniture it was second hand, lots of already used clothes, no holidays abroad, no meals out, took a decade to get a decent kitchen. A lot of young people would see my experience as slumming it and they choose to keep a nicer lifestyle and not have kids

And yes having kids is knackerkng and reduces your quality of life in many ways. Babies in the 50s were often left to cry but nowadays it’s a huge no-no. All life revolves around kids now . It’s lovely to enjoy the kids more but also very hard work

I do t know - we’d have to look at counties that don’t have falling birth rates and see if we can make a comparison I suppose. If I had to guess though based on my own experiences and that of people I know I’d guess the biggest reason is the economy. You now generally need two people working full time to afford a fairly average standard of living and kids impact that hugely.
Also I don’t feel like all men have caught on to the fact that now women are doing a hell of a lot more outside the home, that means they have to be doing a hell of a lot more inside it.

I don’t feel like people are expected to do more with their children. If anything I think it’s the opposite, there are so many threads on here about the ‘horror’ of children watching an iPad at dinner or reading a book and not interacting with their parents. There are so many more activities and things like breakfast and after school clubs etc.

My female friends who are child free are so by choice. Money wasn’t a factor, they just don’t want them. There isn’t that expectation of it so much anymore. The majority of us also took a while to get married, there isn’t that pressure to marry someone from school and marry so you can move out. The only ones who did get married to their uni/school are now divorced. All of us work full time, and those with male partners share the load so it’s not like they’re feeling out upon and don’t want children to add the load. Quite a few of those that have children stopped at one, saying they feel content, stress free, and enjoy the current work/life balance.

There is multiple factors at play here I think but comparing experiences and costs are big ones.

I think though that largely women these days have realised that actually you just can’t have it all despite what we were once told!!

I don’t know a single woman who has all of the following:

• well paid work she enjoys
• children (she feels she gets enough quality time with)
• a partner/husband who treats her well and who shares both the mental and physical load of childcare/domestic chores equally as well as the financial burdens.
• Time for herself, hobbies, relationships

Most I know are struggling with balancing work, children and a partner who may or may not be good - but even the good ones don’t share in the load of everything equally. In all cases the woman shoulders the majority.

I think finding a decent partner to do life with and the costs of living and raising children aside it’s simply becoming more and more common for women choose themselves over the stresses and pressures of family life.

There is definitely more pressure to do more with the children now. When i was young i was expected to look after my siblings from the age of about 8. My eldest is 19 and has never babysat for his siblings.

It's a contributing factor but cost is by far and away the biggest reason more people don't have more kids in my personal experience. Cost of housing, cost of childcare, cost of food etc etc. Also age, if you want to buy a home, get married and have decent financial stability before having kids good luck doing that before your early thirties given how high deposits are, how expensive rent is and throw in paying for a student loan too. This is more or less what happened to us, we had our kids at 32 and 36 and as much as I'd love another I'm 39 and feel like I've left it a bit late.

After housing costs and childcare costs (which are also high because people need to be housed) there's not enough money.

I do not think that is true at all - take a look at Gransnet. I have done my fair share of looking after my 7 GC to allow my AC to work and also just to have fun with them. And all my wide circle of friends of a similar age are busy looking after their GC, collecting from school, making their tes etc. etc.

On the broader issue, there is no doubt that I can see my AC feel they have to do more for their own children and there seems to be pressure to be closely involved in their lives, e.g. making sure they do homework, pushing exam revision, taking them to lots of activities, waiting on them rather a lot etc.

My own children were far more independent - e.g. from the age of 5 they made their own lunchboxes, bathed themselves, got ready for bed (we read a story and did the cuddling bit!), played in the garden unattended etc. I never asked if they had homework - they just got on with it; and we only helped with exam revision if they were stuck with something. We did take them to activities, but nowhere near as many and from an older age.

Going back to my generation, it really was eat breakfast then out the door to find friends to play with for the day.... we would walk to the rec, or bike round the streets, or play in each others' houses. From the age of 10 I regularly babysat my baby sister (she was 9 years younger); and I took myself to school from age 5-6 - this involved a bus ride, crossing roads and a long walk either end. And it was not because my mum was out at work - she wasn't. And there were no fat children, nor adults very much - those that were really stood out. And I used to bike to the seaside (about 4 miles away) and swim in the sea unsupervised from about 12.

I think there are lots of reasons why things have changed: both parents working (either by choice or because of finances) and needing to make up for the time they have to spend away from their children; worries about safety outdoors, particularly as regards traffic; a greater emphasis on health and safety; the dwindling of open spaces or areas where a child could safely play unsupervised. It is also interesting that weirdos were around but no-one seemed to worry so much about them - there was a strange bloke who hung around sometimes (rural area) and we all ignored him - and my DS used to say that "Old Tom was out again with his willy hanging out as we went by on the bus" .... I know, I know - all seems horrifying now! But that is how it was!

I think that I, and also my children, expected less - e.g. holidays were all camping when I was small, and my DC did not see the inside of a hotel till they were about 15. We really did have no luxuries, and neither did my children - this is beginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch!! But it is all true.......

Do children have better lives now? - not necessarily better, just different. Do all these factors influence decisions about how many children to have? - I am sure they do as parents want "better" for their chidlren, as we did for ours - it is the way life progresses. They were not necessarily the Good Old Days - I think each has its advantages and disadvantages.

As a child of the 60’s I totally agree op. In those days children fitted in with what their parents wanted.

It makes me smile when posters fret about not having enough money to take their children out in the summer holidays. The only place my mum ever took me was to my grandparents, partly because most child centred activities did not exist and even if they did we didn’t have any money.
We spent the whole holiday ‘playing out’ and it was fabulous.

@MumChp just ignore

I went home and baked the cake for school which were asked to provide and did a lot of other life admin stuff to run a family.
I left at 2.30 pm if that's important - I don't really understand why you think I had a lot of time to rest. At my child's school 9 out of 10 parents work fulltime - it's really not a choice if you want to support your familiy.

People are living longer and at some point a smaller younger generation will become a smaller elderly population, which is probably a good thing really. Plus we’re in a climate crisis and the planet can’t support rising birth rates.

The difficulty is in the interim bit which we are felling economically now. Our current set up is not affordable.

@Thechaseison71 How can you crow about awareness & experience and not even realise people work different hours/patterns to 9-5?! 😆

Oh goody. It's been at least 5 mins since we had a gentle parenting bashing thread.

I've got no idea why you think gentle patenting is "high-intensity" by which I think you mean time consuming. You seem to imply that it makes children less independent, which is simply not true. Gentle parenting is about understanding your child's point of view, proving age appropriate explaintions when things go wrong, being empathetic and not using random punishments.

Well unless you started at 6am it could've been a half day at most

I work 7-3, why would that be a half day at most? What about parents who do shift work? You have a very narrow experience...

Yes, some parents do feel an expectation to do more for their kids than they used to - although I think that’s largely only the case for the relatively well-off middle classes.

I don’t think this has anything to do with falling birth rates though. I think falling birth rates are much more down to people settling down a little later than they used to, not being able to buy property (or to move to accommodate more kids), having full control over contraception, expensive childcare, and having far less disposable income in general. I think it’s a lot more about money and property than time.

I don’t think a falling birth rate is a bad thing overall, though. People are living longer and at some point a smaller younger generation will become a smaller elderly population, which is probably a good thing really. Plus we’re in a climate crisis and the planet can’t support rising birth rates.

I also think there are good reasons why extended families living together isn’t the norm. Of course for some people it’s fantastic but in practice if this was the norm, an awful lot of women - and it would undoubtedly be primarily women who ended up taking it on - are going to find themselves caring for children and elderly parents with disabilities/dementia at the same time, while also working. I also think property prices mean that even if they pool resources, most families can’t afford a house big enough for a family of parents and kids and also grandparents to live in comfortably.

Added to that, living arrangements borne of duty and obligation (rather than a genuine wish for someone’s daily company) are very, very rarely good for family relationships in my opinion. I’ve seen it breed endless resentment and strain. My father witnessed that when his own grandmother lived with his family when he was a child. Yes, it’s standard in some cultures but everyone I’ve ever known from those cultures has said there are endless potential disadvantages to it.

There’s tendency for people to look back at the customs of times they didn’t actually live in through very rose-tinted spectacles.

I'm quite aware of that stuff, but it's been the case for years

It was very different 20 years ago.

I'm early 50s so same age as many of the parents here with primary school age kids

I think your experience is quite different so wouldn't extrapolate that to others. It's quite unusual to be a grandma to a college aged dc in your early 50s.

That was a reply for someone else so no need for the sarky tone

Overnight shift the night before. Time to rest before going at 3,15pm then

Good for you.

Well unless you started at 6am it could've been a half day at most

I had a shift at our local hospital from 10pm to 7am. But fair enough if you don't count that a full day... it think it was exhausting.

Okay right so the plan is now to not be arrested or have the kid thrown out of her school. Super. Great plan!