To think this country's future looks bleak due to the attitude towards having children

[KookyExpert]

I have observed a very hostile attitude towards people with children especially on MN. Whenever anyone posts anything about struggling financially due to childcare etc, there are lots of people commenting on how having a family and children are lifestyle choice.
As the saying goes it takes a village to raise a child, there are no villages these days and most families have both parents working which makes the role of parenting even harder in the current times.
Not just that, there are many family friendly organisations but in reality if someone has a young child and when parents have to take time off work to look after sick children, there are so many people moaning about it.
UK reported its lowest birth rate in the last 2 decades and it's relying on migrants to fill the jobs. With the hostile attitude and crippling childcare costs, I think this country's future looks bleak and the shortage for many occupations will only get bigger with increased reliance on migrants to fill those jobs if people keep choosing to have no children.
I expect people to have bit more sympathy for parents with children and less hostility to create a better future for everyone.

But arguably the root cause of having not enough carers/bus drivers/etc is too many people in the first place. Growing the population further to cater for them is almost like taking on more debt to pay for existing debts. It's just perpetuating the problem and pushing it down the line.

Deliberately depriving a child of a father is probably one of the cruelest things you can do to them.

Why do people do this . . .

I don’t fully agree op. I think the main reason the birth rate will go down is quite simply, because having children is mostly shit, especially for women.

Most of us in my friendship group of mums with young kids are all having the same issues:

-Our bodies have been destroyed, we are struggling to shift baby weight and are not given enough time to exercise.

-We’ve gone part time because the men are the higher earners. This means less money for ourselves and our pensions.

-We’ve fucked our careers and job fulfilment due to long maternity breaks and then being trapped at the same companies due to maternity pay policies.

-We are exhausted from still working but also playing the main part in raising kids. We have the mental load. Men rarely intuitively offer help, and need instructions, but when we ask them to help, it’s ‘nagging’.

After most of us having a shit mother’s day yesterday, we were all saying we wish we had just stayed single and will be encouraging our daughters to do the same.

I would identify this as the problem rather than ‘attitudes towards having children’.

Regarding the lifestyle choice, i don’t think many women enter into this knowing this will be their life. Why would anyone choose that?

I’m not saying all men are dickheads, there are plenty of fantastic men. But have you not read any threads on here? Men can be good men, but less good fathers.

Last weekend, i was thinking about how my kids’ nails needed clipping and they needed haircuts and about activies for them and a form of physical activity for my son with a health condition. My DH is a lovely guy, but he was thinking about watching F1.

It is not free childcare.

Curious to know what free everything parents get?

Yes having children is a lifestyle choice.
no one has gone to India, Nigeria or any other country and dragged people to the UK against their will. Those people have made their own choice. So I still don’t get your point.

Your right not totally free but you're notnoayinf 100% of the cost though

The point being is you're given help yet it's never enough

Unless you have children you can see why some parents think that. Raising a family is expensive so I can see why the government gives them more.

So why is your list of things childfree people should get any different? Why should we get behind what you think you deserve? Why is the help you're given never enough?

I don’t fully agree with this. I do see the point being made, but that statement is a bit ‘people in a low paid job could work harder and get a high paid job’ to me.

If you can’t afford to live near family and work long hours, it’s not simple to create that village. The majority of people attending mum and baby groups are nannies and childminders (and this was my experience about 8 years ago in London as well as today in the countryside several hundred miles away from London). Dd attends several groups, but only the swimming session has the same mums attending regularly. My ds was also very ill in his first year, which had a big impact on ability to regularly attend groups and create links with other parents. We’ve tried swaps, but play dates in my ds year were tricky as lots of parents were anxious after Covid. (Ds was in reception when Covid first hit after moving to the area, so it wasn’t easy to make up for that missed time meeting other parents.) Even our drop off party saw half the parents stay for 7-8yo. I’m happy to do favours and I’ve offered, but haven’t yet been asked to do many. I’ve employed childcare, but in less than a year they’re pregnant so we’re now supporting them through that (as should happen) but they are very much less available with pregnancy related issues, so that has a knock-on effect with time/work/ability/money to help and connect with others. We’ve been trying to manage the ADHD assessment process which requires weeks of courses at 2 mornings a week - even though we’ve already got the techniques taught in place. We set up our own informal monthly group from one of those groups. We’re also going down the autism pathway and both require quite a lot of paperwork to do give all the info they need, which again, is much needed but time consuming when put against parenting and a full time job (often over 40h).

Comparatively to a friend of mine, who was able to stay near parents in an area where plenty of school friends still lived, they easily built a network with these old school friends, their parents help out and they got to know friends of friends.

I do agree some effort has to be put into connecting with other parents etc but I also think the situation (and personality) of the parent (and the child) has an impact too. It’s not always as simple as everybody without a local support network hasn’t made any effort.

And ‘building a network‘ is also only done by the women most of the time.

I've read about half the responses on here and most are hostile. It's hard bringing up children and we should have compasssion. Yes there are entitled people, but there are also many people struggling through with PND, lonliness, cost of living crisis etc

I was in the situation of not having a village with my first baby and have had to build one. It's bloody hard! I feel like I'm constantly helping others and asking others to help me. Most of my annual leave l'm looking after ( multiple) other children in return for favours back and it's exhausting.

I'm also caring for my elderly mother who lives 2 hours away (in wales) a choice to move 2 hours away from her. To do my degree/ specific have to live near a city.

That's before getting into the price if housing/ childcare. It's not encouraging people to have children and it's not just the UK.

Let's see

Council tax pay 75%
2 adult household works out 50% each

Maybe let's make that fair and every adult in a household pays the same.

If you lost your job and subsequently your home you won't be housed your at the bottom of the list.

Yes but you were complaining about parents wanting more. When you're doing the exact same thing.
You're also confusing a single adult households with being childfree. The two are not the same thing.

In most countries you get an additional personal allowance for each child, to reduce the parents' tax bill. That would be much fairer: for the tax paid to reflect the number of dependents the household income is supporting.

In Hungary your tax rate is reduced for each child you have and if you have 3 you pay no income tax.

Birth rates are plummeting in every country outside sub-Saharan Africa. There simply will not be young immigrants prepared to come here to fill the gaps. Wise countries are planning for the demographic shift and introducing family-friendly policies.

Given the UK made no provision whatsoever for the pensions, healthcare and social care the ageing Boomers would require and operated all of those systems as a ponzi scheme, it is vanishingly unlikely there are any politicians with the strategic vision to implement appropriate policies to address this.

Children is a choice it's not a charitable contribution to society

I do agree that the UK should be as family friendly as possible. However presuming that the British children of today will definitely work in the future is perhaps a bit of a stretch. Overall the British work ethic is incredibly poor in most spheres and leads to poor outcomes and low productivity. Soon there won't even be migrants who will see this as an attractive place to work or they will revert to the British workers' attitude. So with regards to workers of tomorrow I think we need to concentrate on British society's attitude to work rather than hoping childbearing will solve the problem.

"Birth rates are plummeting in every country outside sub-Saharan Africa"

Fertility rates are coming down pretty fast in sub-Saharan Africa too - they're just starting from a much higher level, and population lag means that there's decades of growth baked in, barring catastrophes.

To be clear, because of lag PP was accurate that "birth rates" aren't coming down in (most of) sub-Saharan Africa, so I'm not correcting her, just filling in a bit of context.

The Mumsnet village is in laws minding your children for free, and it's a one way street. No wonder so many opt out.

God this site is misanthropic and weird

You do realise how pensions work right? They are not just big savings pots and will need future generations to administer etc. but you just keep telling yourself that you won’t need future generations, ignorance will help I’m sure.

I've not really noticed any particular hostility towards people with kids but that may be because I had mine a while ago and I only have one, so my experience is limited and could be a bit dated if that's possible in this area at all.

I have, however, recently been reading some news article about childcare and was quite shocked to find out how expensive it is! I didn't think it was that cheap when my son was younger but it seems to have more than doubled now while I am not really seeing the same trend in salaries but I guess the cost of living crisis has done its job over the last few years.

It's never really been easy to raise kids, which is why so many people often feel like it's never the right time to have them. However as life in general gets harder for people overall, people may become less and less tolerant in general, not just when it comes to other people's children. I am wondering if it is this that you are experiencing rather than any particular intolerance towards people with kids?

Birth rates are plummeting in every country outside sub-Saharan Africa.

In which case, can we be confident that throwing more cash at this is the answer? France gives parents massive amounts of money, and as stated upthread, Hungary essentially waives the requirement to pay tax if you have a big enough number of kids. And yet both have plummeting birth rates.

I've said this on a few threads before but I think what's needed is to understand whether women are just, in increasing numbers, not interested in having kids, and if so, what could possibly encourage them to change their mind. Just throwing money at parents and bleating on about future generations of taxpayers is burying our heads in the sand. We (UK and global 'we') need a realistic plan for what we do when inevitably we cannot keep the Ponzi scheme going with more babies.

I've said this on a few threads before but I think what's needed is to understand whether women are just, in increasing numbers, not interested in having kids, and if so, what could possibly encourage them to change their mind.

Stopping educating us and/or removing our access to contraception works apparently.

Another way of saying that the more options women have the fewer children that will be born.

This is, of course, a good thing.