Birth rate hits record low - 1.49 children per woman

[MidnightPatrol]

The ONS has released its latest data on the UK birthrate.

The number of children per women has dropped from 1.55 in 2022 to 1.49 in 2022 - the lowest on record.

This is the lowest number of births in the UK since 2002 - when the population was 10 million people smaller.

Do we think this problem will inevitably worsen? Are there particular reasons people are having less children (unique to the UK vs the rest of the world?).

Should we be taking steps to increase it / stop it reducing further?

@NewYearResolutions the standard of care is often already low. How low do you want it to go?

This.

There are plenty of demographics still churning them out, you can be sure of that.

I'm childfree through choice, so part of the problem. I have just a few random observations.

I know several women who were from large traditional families and who saw how much of their lives their mothers sacrificed raising 4+ kids — how they did 90% of the childcare and bore the all domestic and emotional burden of child rearing before going on to do the same for grandchildren. If they decide to have children at all, their daughters have limited it to one or at the most two.

There's a clear correlation between higher education among women and lower birth rates. Women have gone from being chattels and dependents, at the whim of their menfolk, to being autonymous human beings who are can find the same satisfaction in work and independence as men if they wish to. This is happening all over the world. The reason the Taliban has banned education for women is because they want baby machines, not women who can think for themselves.

These days we all know women whose lives are dominated by children with ASD, SEN and MH issues. We also know that getting support for children with these issues is difficult. In my social circle I have one mum of three whose daughters in their late teens and early 20s all regularly threaten or actually attempt suicide. I know several women whose children are ND and ASD and require exceptional levels of care which their male partners don't seem able or willing to provide. One of those women hasn't had more than a couple of consecutive hours of sleep at night for years because her son (now 17) doesn't sleep much and gets distressed if one of his parents isn't awake with him. She has aged dramatically, she and her husband are both on antidepressants and she talks about wishing that she and her son could be killed in a car crash. Older friends who've wondered about having a child as they approach 40 have decided not to. They're aware of research that says the chances of autism rise with the mother's age and seeing at first hand how hard life can be with a child with complex needs has deterred them. This is a sane and rational.

In many ways this is a good thing. Women are better educated and are making informed choices for themselves, rather than being forced or expected to be baby-making machines as they have been for millennia.

Ways will have to be found to cope, just as they were after the Black Death. It's really important that academics and politicians start coming up ideas of what would be an optimal population for the UK and how to manage the decline in numbers.

Tbh I’m not surprised, my baby neice is the baby you’d pick if you got a choice. Sleeps well, goes to bed easily, feeds well, easily settled when she cry’s but oh my god it’s just constant work looking after her.

Its just none stop. I don’t blame any young people thinking nope I’ll stick to cats thank you.

The best and most enduring way to improve people's entire lives, and consequently the health and care needs of the country, is to throw vast resources at shaping healthy lives in the early years.

Kids who grow up socially, physically and mentally healthy don't need half the resources (be that benefits, healthcare or the criminal justice system) that deprived ones do.

Louise Perry talks about the Victorian and early 20th century women* who, before birth control, were warned by doctors that another child would kill them — but their husbands still wanted sex and they couldn't stop them (rape in marriage was legal until the 1970s) and so they died. Women taking charge of their fertility is one of the great social changes of our time yet often gets taken for granted.

*it goes without saying that while Perry writes about the 19th and early 20th centuries, all women since time immemorial have lived under the same pressure to reproduce.

Quite.

This is the research referred to upthread by a couple of people:

All very interesting.

80% of women without children at the age of 30 (I believe it's that age) are INVOLUNTARILY childless, ie through happenstance, not through choice.

For the single child families I know, starting a family late has been a big factor. People don't want to change much in their late 30s/40s. Multiple kids often means changing work patterns, moving to a bigger house, having 5-10 years of less financial freedom and people don't want that.

I have three children and don't regret it, they love eachother immensely. But it's hard work and I'm a hard worker. Definitely not for the faint hearted.

Having said that, I'm a bit advocate for more than 1 child. From a child's perspective I can only imagine how lonely it must be.

Yes I think this is an important point. Yes a lower global population is good, and lower birthrates often come as a result of female education, empowerment and choice. Also a good thing, but we need governments to think about what they are going to do about the ageing population, whereas at the moment it's all haranguing women to ' not leave it too late' and berating them for selfishly wanting a career. They need to fund elderly care, stop pandering to Brexiteers and tell the truth about what is going to happen to them in their old age.

Not many people are talking about infertility and particularly the male infertility crisis where 'sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018, from 104 to 49 million/ml. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year'.

I think at least part of the reason people are having less/no children is that they do not have a choice because of infertility. I say that as someone who has just had their 3rd round of IVF due to male infertility. It sucks.

Forgot to post link

www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is-causing-a-male-fertility-crisis

These days we all know women whose lives are dominated by children with ASD, SEN and MH issues. We also know that getting support for children with these issues is difficult.

@Abeona I’m not sure what your point is. In previous generations, those children would probably have been consigned to institutions or died young due to a lack of understanding/indifference towards their needs.

I think that 80% statistic is well dodgy. When I was in my 20s I knew I didn't want children but I felt uncomfortable about saying it because it was, and still is, not something a woman is really supposed to say. Women have always, for millennia, been expected to want babies. Non-conformity is dangerous. Witch-burning springs to mind. That social conditioning doesn't just disappear in a couple of generations.

Ask a woman under 30 if she wants children and most will say yes because they think that to declare otherwise will make them seem like lesbians, man-haters or not seeking a long-term relationship with a man. Women are still, on the whole, widely expected to have a man and children in their lives. It's still the norm and it takes bravery when you're young to go against the herd.

@HBGKC

That was me. Nah you've muddled two different stastics.

1. 50% of women who reach 30 without a child will never have a child.
2. Of women who never have a child, 80% are due to unplanned childlessnes. That is, they were fertile and wanted children but life factors saw them run out of time

@ItsAllAboutTheDosh I'm just pointing out that if we aren't having children, where are all the care workers going to come frome. Many people here are happy to say a shrinking and aging population is good. But they haven't thought about who will care for the old.

As someone who has just the one child by choice, I’m obviously part of this phenomenon, and I wouldn’t have it any other way - I look at all my frazzled, exhausted, under -resourced friends who have gone on to have larger families (while simultaneously working FT and bearing the bulk of the domestic burden) and thank my lucky stars that we stopped at one.

I do worry, though, what an ageing, inverted pyramid demographic will mean for those children who are born over, say, the next century or so. Already schools, nurseries and playgrounds are closing where I live in London, and children/young people have become a bit of an afterthought in terms of public policy - there’s nowhere near enough attention paid to education issues for example. Government policy is increasingly shaped both by and for the elderly, and things that affect primarily families and young people - notably housing - are consistently overlooked.

I also wonder about the implications of an increasingly elderly population on society’s capacity for creativity and innovation - where will all the future’s great art/music/ideas come from, and will society adopt them and continue to evolve, or become sclerotic and ‘stuck’?

It's a serious issue that's very understated, and only understood at a superficial level.

I expect that in a decade, it will be more of a concern than climate change. Just my view.

@Abeona

Autism rates increase much more predictably with paternal age, not maternal. Maternal age is more complex

I also wonder about the implications of an increasingly elderly population on society’s capacity for creativity and innovation - where will all the future’s great art/music/ideas come from, and will society adopt them and continue to evolve, or become sclerotic and ‘stuck’?

This always gets overlooked but generally innovation & evolution comes from new young blood.

I'm saying that because these children/ young people aren't sent off to special boarding schools and institutions we're more aware of them in our community. We see how stressful it is for parents on a daily basis in a way that previous generations didn't.

I've been back to my post and I think my point is perfectly clear, but I'll try again. Some of the decline in birthrate may stem from the fact that people now know a lot more about autism and its prevalence. They are more likely to know parents whose lives have been radically changed by the needs of their autistic child. They're also aware of evidence that indicates a correlation between mother's age and and the likelihood of autism. They look at their neighbours or family members living with autistic children and decide that maybe they won't have a child later in life, where in the past they might have tried to fit one in before it's too late.

I am certain that this issue will overtake climate change as the hot button issue within the next 15 years, because a significantly top heavy population is a Very Bad Thing for a world obsessed with 'growing' economies (which btw is such a laughably childish concept it's hard to believe it exists).

I have a few thoughts on it:

1. A large proportion of women in the developed world have had their hormone balance artificially changed for most of their adult life, due to contraception. There is some evidence that hormone balance massively affects your desire to reproduce and logically it makes sense that your drive to have sex and babies would be mediated by hormones.

2. (related to 1) The desire to procreate is largely instinctive and not much governed by our frontal cortex. In the past, you knew you could get pregnant, but that man looked damn tasty (or, in many cases, he held you down and did it to you regardless of what you wanted) and you ended up pregnant regardless of what you want. Now, with contraception, you have to decide to have a baby (relatively rare accidents notwithstanding). Without a hormonal drive, people make the decision in a logical way - can we afford it? Is it a good idea? Logically, having children isn't a good idea for women - even the best pregnancy will affect your health and in some cases having a baby can kill you. So without the 'I must have a baby right now' effect or the 'Oh fuck it, I accidentally got up the duff' effect, population inevitably drops.

3. The social landscape for women has changed in the sense that they can have careers, and votes and property and whatnot, but the fundamental way society works hasn't caught up at all, meaning that childcare is a joke and men are generally still lazy and useless and never clean a toilet. Women have the shit prospect of losing all their independence and indeed sanity when they have a baby because men can't be a tiny bit less useless. When approached with logic (instead of in the fog of baby fever or lust) having babies in this context is not attractive.

One complex outcome of this situation is that the immigrant hating Rishi Sunaks of the world will have to grow a brain and realise that immigration is vital to keep the country from descending into chaos.

I predict that once the people who are born around now reach 18 there will be huge competition for young blood with countries throwing incentives at immigrants trying to attract and hold onto them.

The other scenario, and not a totally unlikely one, is that men will start taking rights way from women as a way of forcing them back into babymaking - this will be particularly true for the morons who simply can't accept immigration.

So all the 40-something women wanting to have children would be well advised to go and find a younger man to father them! It's just a bit inconvenient when so many women get to their mid-late 30s before they find a man they're happy to marry and have a child with — and often the men are older. The prospects for women in their late 30s looking to pair up with a man 10 years younger seem a bit remote. But who knows?

Lack of affordable housing

Fewer partnerships willing to marry to commit (largely to financially protect a female because they are the ones who have the uterus)

Hence fewer rent-a-wombs. Thank god for birth control so you no longer have to bring up a grunts offspring.

The other scenario, and not a totally unlikely one, is that men will start taking rights way from women as a way of forcing them back into babymaking - this will be particularly true for the morons who simply can't accept immigration.

You only have to look at the US and the loss of abortion rights to see this is already happening.