How do we solve this if people hate benefits?

[is30tooyoungformidlifecrisis]

I've been mulling this over for a while and really trying to avoid a goady post but I'm genuinely interested in what people think.

The reality is in the UK we have a rapidly declining birth rate and an ageing population, so in a decade we're going to be in trouble as a country.

On an individual level, people (that I see online) seem to be very anti-benefits for parents. I always see the line 'if you can't afford kids don't have them' etc. But the reality is that the cost of living is going up, childcare is up, housing is up, and if people literally cannot afford kids they won't have them and that's what we're seeing happen now.

On a wider society level, we need to encourage people to have children to keep our population stable, especially since politicians and the media have stirred up so much hatred towards immigrants so we can't rely on immigration to solve our population problem. The only solution I see is to increase benefits for having children and make it easier - eg. increase maternity pay, subsidise childcare costs, increase child benefit maybe in a means-tested way. But I think all that would go down like a lead balloon with people crying 'the government shouldn't pay for your kids, pay for them yourself' - but really, if the government have got the country to a point where it's a real problem, it's on them to sort it. What do you all think?

Valid questions, and very emotive. Funnily enough, Had a discussion recently about the falling birth rate, and was shocked that it’s now 1.44 per woman, and not the 2.4 children as it used to be (early 70s).

I agree that the ‘government shouldn’t pay for your family’, as I think this will encourage irresponsible parents to live off benefits. Something as simple as getting paid two weeks state pay to cover school holidays per child would help (so companies don’t have the cost) may help. (Maybe the companies have to give permission to join the scheme , so it doesn’t affect business etc).

Make childcare costs tax deductible would be a start.

Kill off everyone over 70?
Edit to say that would include me.

A bit radical, but then it would save on state pensions, illness costs in the elderly, so wouldsave money, but not encourage more children.

It would seem pretty obvious to me that much cheaper childcare would allow more women with young children to work - if they wanted to - and therefore to pay tax. As it stands, so many who aren’t big earners don’t have a choice.

But successive govts. have chosen to ignore this glaringly obvious fact.

More Paternity leave (in addition not instead of maternity leave, to be taken after mother returns to work (something like 1st 6 months mother, 2nd 6 months either, last six months father/spouse)

Free holiday clubs and wrap around care.

The problem is - even in countries with far better childcare help (eg Scandinavia), the birth rate is still low and dropping.

So… would the extra benefits even help?

I actually think bigger issues are housing (no one I know is living in housing as big / as nice areas as their parents), and the fact most households have two adults in full time work meaning there’s just no time!

I also think women still end up with the majority of the domestic labour too, and managing that for multiple kids on top of a full time job is just incredibly thankless.

And I also think… parenting in 2025 is like an extra job where you are required to invest time in your children, thinking about their education and future, saving for them and perhaps funding a university education and house deposit.

Extra benefits can’t solve those issues!

Do you think that a combination of the Pill, the de-criminalisation of abortion, the feminist movement in a general way and the expectations of the whole populace has resulted in a different attitude to having children nowadays? So often it's a case of 'can't afford' now, whereas in 1870 or 1923 it might not have been looked at like that. Did the advent of Child Benefit start a mindset that 'governments' should pay for children?

I think this is bigger and not particularly related to benefits.

there is a global shift to declining population and many countries are well ahead of the UK on this curve. Those countries have completely different economic systems to the uk in terms of benefits and COL, and they’re different from each other.

Giving people benefits won’t be enough to get them having babies

There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG with a culture that does this.[randomly outs self as trekkie] It’s all very well as a philosophical question. I wonder how many 70+yr olds are providing free childcare so people can afford to work with kids.

it might not have been looked at like that

Families in poverty have always struggled to feed their children but didn't have the choice to prevent or terminate pregnancies - so babies were abandoned at foundling hospitals and children were sent out to work from as young as five years old, usually in dangerous and dirty miserable jobs. I don't think that's any better!

The answer could be universal basic income.
People aren't having children because it's quite frankly too much work to have children, be responsible for all the chores and work full time. People are realising they don't have to have kids if they don't want them,
Plus the quality of men has gone downhill

People don't hate benefits. The government are trying to push this rhetoric (and failing)

I'm not surprised that the birth rate is declining.
But more humans on an already overpopulated planet isn't the answer.

Very unpopular with some people, but migration will at least take some of the pressure off, increasing retirement age is another way of dealing with it short term. But we need to reevaluate consumerism, jobs and food security.

We simply can't continue as we are as a society, it's unsuitable.

Really interesting question, OP, and some interesting replies.

Instinctively I was going to say greater support for childcare costs, and actually I don’t think those costs are the sort of state support that people object to in general.

But the posters who point out that the falling birth rate is an issue around the world, including in different economies, make a great point - I would be interested in reading some research into the reason for falling birth rates in the western world if anybody has any to share (too tired / lazy to search myself).

Maybe it’s just going to be a tough 20 years or so while the population corrects itself?

People earning enough to live on without state support if they work a full time job has got to be a starting point though.

I think you're right there are many more factors involved. There's a lot of discussion online at the moment about the mental load and the divide of domestic labour between men and women, and how these days both partners are working full time yet women take more much more of the household and childcare. I think platforms like tiktok have allowed many normal women to show the realities of this so people are going into the decision to have children with more information and eyes wide open!

I don't think benefits can solve all issues, but certainly I think decreasing the financial burden and inproving length of maternity leave, adding more leave for fathers/partners as someone else suggested, and subsidising childcare could help many people. Housing is definitely a huge issue, I'm early 30s and the majority of my friends still houseshare to save money, or rent and feel in too precarious a position to have children.

I wonder if working practices have an impact maybe? We all seem to work long hours and then everything is a stressful juggle.

I don't buy into the 'why have children to have someone else raise them' mindset, but I can also see two people working 50 -60 odd hours week to live in a tiny home might not really feel the rewards of having more than 1 child are worth the risks either.

You invest in a career and you have to keep on that treadmill to maintain it and presumably people enjoy thier careers.

I think cheaper childcare would have made me more likely to work full time (and dh who did 4 days a week) but I don't think it would have made me have more children than the 2 we went for.

I'm a big supporter or Universal Basic Income, there are some great books about it (Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman being the one that really made me start thinking about the idea)

One of the arguments for UBI is that whne people have the time/capacity, people are industrious and start their own businesses and find their own ways of making money. I think we see this a lot in women who start their own businesses while on maternity leave, often because they feel they just can't return to work with childcare so expensive and the work life balance so difficult. So it makes me wonder how much more of this we would see if we had a UBI or something similar

We do not need more people having children. The planet is screwed as it is and every child born contributes to its further destruction. When climate change really hits we’re unlikely to be in a position to worry about anything so sophisticated as child benefit, taxes and pensions.

I completely think migration is the answer, we rely on immigrants in this country both to increase our labour in an ageing population and because we're just not training enough of our own, eg. nurses. However I don't think it's a realistic solution given the political climate at the moment, unfortunately the government have run this country into the ground and then turned round and blamed immigrants.

Not to derail, but if immigration is a problem then it's because the government haven't managed it properly. Immigrants themselves as individual people should never be demonised for the government's lacking in leadership

Actually I don't think a declining population is necessarily a problem whether that be from lower birth rates or reductions in immigration.

Yes it would cause an generational issue over how to pay for a larger elderly population which would result in higher taxes and lower benefits for the retired.

But on the upside there is the considerable environmental benefit of having less people, less infrastructure to pay for and given that most wealth in created in services rather than manufacturing then the national wealth and Government revenue would would be distributed amongst a smaller number of people.

Globally, yes. But as an individual country, in the future we're going to have a problem with population and the workforce. I think there are two ways to solve that, either through immigration (which politicians and the media have turned poeple against) or replace our own population by increasing the birth rate. So how else will we tackle the problems this causes in the future?

Mandate men taking a year off work and doing their share perhaps

Not but we wouldn't need so many more children if we didn't have an enormous cohort of 70-95+yos all wanting their index-linked pensions.

I think the pension age should go back down to 65 if the cull age is going to be 70

For me, I simply didn’t want to have children before I was 30. If I’d of had a child at 21, I would probably of had a second at 25/26 and maybe a third at 30. Whereas now, I have one child and will probably have a second at 35 - less inclined to have a third at 40ish.
It wasn’t a money decision, it was a lifestyle choice. I wanted to have my freedom while I was young enough to enjoy it.