Concerned about depopulation

[Shawlshare]

AIBU to think the threat of depopulation is being massively underestimated in the UK?

I am early 50s, 3 kids and have lots of friends, young professionals in their 30s involved in the same hobby as me and nobody is having kids. Nobody wants them. People can’t afford accommodation big enough for kids, cannot afford childcare and find day to day life trying to stay ahead of the cost of living crisis tiring enough. They want to spend the weekend doing what they want to do, which is fair enough, but the UK will rapidly become extinct if this goes on for long.

South Korea is likely to become extinct as a country within 4 generations do to similar issues. I can see the UK going the same way. It’s scary and sad. I can’t see it reversing though as any hint of free childcare / flexible working etc etc is politically unpopular with so many. Anyone else concerned? What’s the solution?

No it’s not. There is a negative net population. Has been for years

think a lot of working women have realised that having children can be very hard work. It can ruin your body. Labour can be traumatic. It is them, and not their oh who will shoulder the grunt wok. It is them whose career will take the hit, their pension will take the hit, their mental well being will take the hit etc etc. To top it all the likely hood is that they will either end up as a single parent or having to tolerate all of the above because most women will tell them that men do not pull their weight.

I think maternity care is woeful but see many men in my generation & below who are much more hands on and share more of the burden eg many companies now offer 3 months paid paternity leave, DHs company are looking at extended this to 6. That would have been amazing when we had dc.

@EmmaWoodhouseOfHighbury I just replied to your question. I haven't seen anyone on this thread saying we should have more and more dc? It's not possible anyway as the ship has sailed.

Yeah, you are racist to assume immigrants don't cover the cost of their welfare requirements via tax. The vast majority are not entitled to the benefits afforded to the nationals who don't want to do the jobs the immigrants do.

the world is greatly over populated and natural resources are fast running out. Reducing the population world wide is the only option to avoid wars in the future. Many areas of the world will become inhabitable with climate changing meaning we will all be fighting for the areas that can still support people.

My only worry is that it will become like the film idiocracy where the intelligent people stop having children and the thick people keep on reproducing .... leading to a dumbing down of society.

As for your question I’m 100% concerned about the future and there’s no solution as if you look on something like babycentre the top boy name is Muhammad… think that says it all

ahhh yes truth and fact.. confirming my point

I am glad you mentioned truth and fact.

Here are the facts and truth.

In 2023, 1.55% of baby boys were given the name Muhammed.

So go on, then. What does it say? 🤔

(1.46% were given the name Noah).

Oh, and the three most popular names for baby girls in England and Wales were Olivia, Amelia and Isla, remaining unchanged since 2022.

Vinavine fathers might be more hands on than in previous generations but that doesn’t mean much does it.
I have worked with many women over the years. I can’t think of any single case where the father did the majority of the housework AND childcare. Not one. I work and have worked in a professional role where some of these women were managers and the breadwinner.
I have seen everything from women crying to me that their dh will not take annual leave during school holidays, putting immense pressure on the wife to find childcare/use her annual leave. To husbands accepting jobs without consulting their wife, who is the breadwinner resulting in the wife having to run around like a headless chicken sourcing childcare.
Men leaving jobs without consulting their wife, and still leaving their house like a pig stye.

the world is greatly over populated and natural resources are fast running out. Reducing the population world wide is the only option to avoid wars in the future

Won't there be war anyway? More older people in the west needing more resources will create conflict with younger countries and other western ones.

@Daffodilsarefading I probably live in a bit of bubble but I don't really see that in my family, friends and colleagues. I also don't have very high cleaning standards 😆

We have crazy leaders, wars, injustice, imbalance, wipe out of species and their natural habitats, man-made climate crisis, nuclear reactors and weapons that need maintenance until the end of time. What exactly is the net value we bring to the planet? I’m not concerned about the depopulation at all.

This is part of the current political issue. I just repeated his own personal tale that a man from Nigeria was happy to call
in and give about his personal journey to working in a bank in Britain and I am called racist. The choice for Britain is
a) a British person living here currently claiming out of work benefits takes the job and we save on the benefits; or
b) someone from Nigeria takes the job and Britain has to continue to support his family and him and the person on benefits because he didn’t get the job.

Situation a) is clearly the best economic option for the UK and yet in pointing this out I am racist. Reform will rise due to the likes of you shutting down perfectly reasonable discussions like this as ‘racist’. Let’s cut Reform’s current lead in the polls by showing that we are open to discussing these concerns rather than just shutting them down. It was the democrats in the IS calling everyone who raised women’s rights ‘transphobic’ that lost them the US election afterall.

I believe you're incorrect, please refer to this link to the office of national statistics.
Main Points:-

• The UK population at mid-year 2023 was estimated to be 68.3 million, an increase of 1.0% since mid-2022.
• The population grew faster in England and in Wales (both 1.0%) than in Scotland (0.8%) or Northern Ireland (0.5%).

• Net international migration was the main contributor to population increase for all four countries of the UK in the year to mid-2023.

a) a British person living here currently claiming out of work benefits takes the job and we save on the benefits; or

but why should anyone take the job if it has a crap wage?

It has been so tiring for us and currently are in a really hard place. We have been asked to move out of the rental we are currently occupying (landlord wants to sell) and yet we can’t get a house to rent, reason being we don’t enough to rent houses that are big enough for our family of 5. We have never defaulted on rent ever but about to become homeless. We can’t buy and can’t rent, we are just stuck at the moment. We don’t want to go on the social housing register but looks like that’s all we have left……really sad and scary.

The fewer people on this planet, the better. We will have to use technology to adapt.

In South Korea the very real drop-off in birth rate is in large part down to men. S Korean culture is horrifically misogynistic and that has not improved in recent years. Women have worked out it's so detrimental to their wellbeing to have children and be saddled with men that they aren't doing it.

Among my friends who don't have children, yes some of it is down to working out that they can have the life they want (travel/freedom to pursue hobbies etc) with no children, but a good proportion of them also don't want the misogyny. They see that childcare falls mainly to women when there is no need for that. They see that men live freer lives than women even when they have children, and they see that women often end up as de facto carers later in life, sometimes for quite horrible men. They reject that as a way to live.

Then when you factor in a hostile financial environment for early years and also for the primary school years, where post-schooldays childcare is often also paid-for, and house prices, what is left to make it attractive?

It's easier to talk about economics than it is to talk about misogyny but I don't think we should underestimate the need for men to change how they approach family life, which includes workplaces changing how they expect men to carry on in their careers after having children. We occasionally try to do something about it as a society but it doesn't seem to stick.

Well i guess the 'thick' people could be educated

I am now in my mid 40s, but I certainly don’t know anyone in their 30s who wants to have children who isn’t doing it. Frankly, every school mum in her 40s at the moment seems to be pregnant or has a young baby or toddler.

Is your hobby a particularly expensive one? Or one that attracts a certain type of person less inclined to traditional family life? BIL and SIL (in their 30s btw) are childfree by choice and would definitely find children expensive. But it’s because they are like van life surfers who still go to raves in forests and buy very expensive mountain bikes. If they spent less money on £4000 bikes and wetsuits and drugs 😂 they would almost certainly be able to afford to have children, if they wanted them, but they don’t, which is perfectly fine.

I'm more concerned about having to integrate another million people every year due to government insanity.

The country functioned with 50 million people in many of our lifetimes. We don't need 70-80 million on the island. The more automation/AI comes in the less jobs there will be to do - less people needed.

AI is about to take over all of our jobs. There will be plenty of people available to wipe bottoms in nursing homes.

Based on threads around this site, that seems very unlikely.

I don’t think it’s ignorance.. and thank you for sharing your facts but .. doesn’t that mean that more Muslim boys are being born than previous years though?? More being born, more being named Muhammad hence moving up the list. 62% would include white Eastern European immigrants.. so wouldn’t all be Joe 🫢. You’re completely missing my point. My family also comes from European immigrants. However I’m highlighting this culture is having more babies because of their family traditions, family support and beliefs. If you’re taking the fact I’ve written "it says it all” as racism then you’ve completely misunderstood my point.

Haven’t RTFT, but wanted to share some thoughts as I’m the generation the OP is talking about. I’m mid-30s and my friends range from early 30s to early 40s. Almost everyone is child-free. Some know for sure they don’t want kids but most are like me and are still on the fence. It’s got nothing to do with affordability (we’re all high earning professionals) or life being stressful enough (we have relatively stress-free, comfortable lives), it’s because life is actually so GOOD now. Your 30s is basically your 20s with money: good health, active social life, travel, exercise, hobbies, self-care, self development / therapy, etc. All of this is very hard to give up/compromise on for the drudgery of raising children. Not to mention the health risks / lasting effects of pregnancy and giving birth, if you’re a woman.

Another thing to add is that the decision amongst those of us on the fence is between one child or staying child-free. I don’t know anyone who is planning / contemplating more than one child. I actually had no idea of the prevalence of 3+ children families before I joined MN - it’s like another world.

The country functioned with 50 million people in many of our lifetimes

Because we didn't have the same demographics.

The more automation/AI comes in the less jobs there will be to do - less people needed.

Why do people think AI will mean no jobs? why won't the jobs change like they have today? And what happens to people who don't have a job, where does their income come from?