For believing the drop in birth rate IS mostly because people who don't want children no longer have to have them

[CurdinHenry]

"Fertility experts" like Geeta Nargund in the news again insisting that "people still want to have children". Obviously some people wish they could have more children than they get to have. But it's never been a better world for people who are just not into it at all (or try one then realise it's not that much fun).

I don't think a survey asking people in vague terms if they'd like kids one day counts as proof of anything.

Every single message we are getting about the future is that it is just going to get shitter. Too much news. AI, climate, war, more pandemic, cost of food and putting a roof over your head costing more and more, it’s an overload of doom. Then loads of young women have seen their mothers work full time but be lumbered with the bulk of the child rearing as well and that happens there is the debate then turns to how they can maybe be helped to work part time when what they actually want is to be able to have the child care split 50:50 with their partner - especially if they have seen their parents split up and they saw their mum who had cut down on work get fucked over financially.

Living in London, most people I know don’t have them because they can’t afford to give children the same quality of life that they had, growing up.

I agree that there was definitely implied pressure although I was lucky that none of it came from my own family.

It was always accepted within my family that other options were available and valid and my parents in particular weren’t bothered about having grandchildren so that helped.

Perhaps sensing the societal expectation helped cement my views that i wasn’t going to have them.

Are you saying all women who have sex with men are doing it as a job?

Mumsnet is so insane about sex

Teenage pregnancies have greatly reduced in recent years, must be a factor.

Untrue. Before there was the relentless what if you regret it stuff. Now there's a much stronger "what if YOU regret it" counterpoint.

Life without children is objectively the rational choice now. Love is the subjective factor but you can't love someone you'll never meet.

I haven’t read the whole thread, but this is not entirely down to women. There are, of course, many women who have children that deliberately choose to wait until they’ve established their career, in their 30s, etc. before having a baby. However, there are certainly not hundreds of age 20-something men queueing up to settle down (I speak from experience). It is much easier to date casually/ sleep around now, so many men are choosing not to get into serious relationships until they’re are older. This obviously has an impact on maternal age and, subsequently, number of children (if any). It’s not all down to women wanting to be high-flying career women. I know of multiple women who would have liked children but just did not meet a suitable man within the right timeframe- whatever that was for them.

I think it's always been accepted that many men don't really want kids. Not sure why it's ok to shame them for it any more than it is to shame women.

Oh lord yes… said in that tone that says that you are clearly too stupid to make such a momentous decision because nobody would make a choice not to saddle themselves with children 🙄

I do wish I had asked more of the patronising feckers about what if they regretted having children 🤣

Why would that make any sense in evolutionary terms?

Because on a basic evolutionary level, species reproduce. Then once the deed is done, very few males hang round to support the family. They move on and impregnate the next one. That is evolution.

Luckily evolution has given us bigger brains and the ability and circumstances to not have to blindly follow the pattern of being born/having children/dying.

So why would most men choose to have them? And why would many women? Great if you like kids but plenty don’t. I know someone who adopted a child as she was infertile. She didn’t really want to do it but in her mind she had to have a husband and child because that is what everyone else did.

It didn’t end well.

Why can we not just embrace the fact that women don’t have to be tied to one path in life if they don’t want to be?

From what I've heard, Japan is managing its aging population quite well, though not perfect. It helps that they have a healthy diet and very few of them are overweight.

Because men want sex and for most of human history there wasn't contraception.

Countries need to have other options for those of the aging population that are unwilling to be a ‘burden’.

I don't think she was shaming anyone. Just stating facts.

Wasn’t trying to shame men. Sharing my own experiences as a 20-30 year old dating a few years back. I also noticed the volume of comments that referenced women going to uni/ having more options, whereas men do not seem to
feature in these kind of responses.

And, if it’s true that many men don’t really want kids, then this has only been compounded by the fact that men have far more options for casual dating now than they did a couple of decades ago. I believe that a lot more women would choose to have more children/ have children younger if they were able to find a suitable partner who was ready to commit at an earlier stage.

Because in evolutionary terms men are best served by having sex with as many different women as possible and hoping some of the children survive.

Women can only bang out one child every year or so so women are better off having that child with the best possible male and caring for that child really carefully.

So man can not be remotely interested in kids and father 100 kids a year, many of which will survive. Women need to be really devoted to their few children to remain in the gene pool.

Life without children is objectively the rational choice now. Love is the subjective factor but you can't love someone you'll never meet.

@CurdinHenry I think some people enjoy being part of a family too. We all have parents, but when they're gone, we may no longer have any close relatives, especially if you're an only child.

As some people have commented, it'll be interesting to see the future choices of today's increasing numbers of only children. Will they decide to be childfree or go in the other direction and have larger families? Or perhaps the concept of families will disappear altogether.

All evolution wants is for men to father children. It doesn’t care whether they parent them.

I think that many men like the idea of fathering children to prove their manhood, parenting them/family life not so much.

My sympathies for your exhaustion. I too would be exhausted if I had to find reasons to cheerlead the useless, inept LDP ministers Japanese government. I honestly can't fathom why you would want to do this.

No, you didn't say Japan had done enough. But you did mention them as a country who had "actively planned and prepared", implying that you think they are doing better than other countries.

There have been far more initiatives in the UK to improve health than in Japan in the 26 years I've lived in Japan. You are right that Japan has increased taxes to fund healthcare but the UK is also doing so - the current government needs no excuse to impose more taxes on its population. And that tax burden is only going to get worse in Japan, as the percentage of workers shrinks. If the government had, say, reduced the amount of pointless construction they fund, to save for healthcare instead, I would see that as a positive step. But they will never do that, because of the corrupt links between politicians and the construction industry. And I would say they are behind the UK in the ways in which they have tried to slow the rate of decline of the birthrate. The overtime limits here are still astronomical, as I mentioned earlier. I agree that a plunging birthrate is unlikely to be turned around, but its fall can be slowed. Japan's is at its lowest ever last year.

I am not misunderstanding the demographics of Japan - I know the population has been ageing for decades. It's on the news even more regularly than shoes on or off threads on mumsnet. When I said "will", I meant that the effects will be far more catastrophic than they are now in the future. At the moment the economic malaise here is largely blamed on other factors, not the greying society. And people here seem to believe that there is no answer, rather like the climate change problem.

It's more complex than that. My view is that old people here (I'm in my 3rd year living in Japan) have the option to not stop moving. It is much easier to open and run a small business here, and keep it going even on reduced hours. There was a TV segment recently about a woman in my area who runs a bento shop at the age of 85. She still cycles too, which is very common.

I see old folks out and about every day contributing to their community; simple things like sweeping leaves or litter picking for example. That's not to say that older folk in the UK don't volunteer, but it seems to be more formalised and less autonomous, e.g. volunteering through church or at a charity shop.

In Japanese culture, people don't want to be a nuisance or a burden. This can be a problem as they won't seek help they need, but it's very very different to how I saw things with my grandmother in the UK, who had huge amounts of support but was never pushed to do anything herself that would have made her quality of life better (eat better, exercise, make an effort to be social). She was happy to sit on the sofa and have the world come to wait on her hand and foot!

@BadLad the overtime situation is insane 😭 it's pretty normal for my husband to come home at 21:00, and with recent neverending global crises, he's had quite a few days where he's left the house at 6:50 and got back at 00:40 the next day.

Our toddler follows him around in the morning like a lost puppy because he misses his dad. I'm having our second baby in December and have finally put my foot down and said no more nomikai.

At a recent development check up, the lady assessing my son asked about lifestyle and then looked at me and said "so you're pretty much doing it alone, then." I hadn't really thought about it, but she's right (other than the privilege of not having to work at the moment). No wonder a lot of folk stop at 1.

I read an article a few years ago about a public body which was rather forcibly demanding its staff stay until after the last train had gone. They "placated" their staff by paying for their taxis home. So forcing horrendous working hours onto the employees and then wasting a load of public money on taxis. Absolutely disgraceful.

That probably plays a part. But there’s also people having less than they would want to be able to afford them and people leaving it too late.