Why women aren’t having babies

[SmudgeHughes]

I saw a young woman post this on social media recently and thought it was so well-expressed that I had to share.

‘The problem isn’t that men want more children but that too many men want them without restructuring their own lives to carry the burden of parenthood.

If men matched their desire with an equal willingness to parent like taking the night shifts, booking the appointments, shouldering the career sacrifices then women would be more open to the idea.

Until then, women are simply refusing to be the ones who pay the highest price for someone else’s dream.

That’s not selfishness but wisdom hard earned through centuries of women being told that family is everything only to find out that "everything" really meant everything is theirs to do.

Women are increasingly unwilling to subsidize men’s dreams with their own exhaustion. They are making rational decisions about their capacity and saying no not because they don’t love children but because they know love alone doesn’t neutralise burnout, stalled careers, unaffordable childcare or the silent erosion of identity that comes when one partner carries the bigger share of parenting.

So when men say they want more children women hear something different like, I want the idea of more children but I haven’t accounted for who will actually raise them.

It’s similar to someone who dreams of a puppy without calculating who will walk it or clean the accidents on the rug. Women have woken up to a truth previous generations often swallowed.’

There was more; just thought it was beautifully expressed.

Well there's a difference between "more" in the sense of more responsible/senior and "more" in the sense of more time/availability at odd hours.
If you were working in, say, structural engineering and wanted to go from 40 hours to 20, you wouldn't be taking on more projects but you could go from being a part time junior engineer on 1-2 projects to a part time senior engineer overseeing 1-2 projects instead of the 3-4 that a full time senior engineer would oversee. Those roles would be different but not necessarily more or less compatible with having your main focus on the kids.
If you're not interested in promotion at all then of course that's a perfectly valid choice, but I don't think reduced hours alone should be a bar to promotion.

I think pp is American & tbf work attitudes are different there. They don't have mandated maternity leave the way we do.

I have actually never worked in the US. Well except during college lol but didn’t need maternity leave then

I do use the expression ‘mommy track’ tho for jobs that are just 9-5 and you leave on time and it’s not expected to stay late/work weekends/travel for work. I have essentially just downsized myself because my kids are still young. Probably far from the only one choosing this option (some colleagues have done the same though others have not. Like many things in life, it’s a personal choice)

And we’ve seen today’s story, ‘Motherhood penalty’ costs women an average £65,618 in pay by time first child turns five.
Women’s average monthly earnings fall by 42% compared with one year before birth, ONS study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/oct/03/mothers-lose-an-average-65618-in-pay-by-the-time-their-first-child-turns-five?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

That surprises me actually, when I hear "Mommy track" I think 9-3 for three or four days a week.

Yes I understand the motherhood penalty as a deterrent to having children. But the poster I was asking questions of seemed to be making out like women like to down their hours as they enjoy the extra free time as using their partners income as their own. But that wouldn't explain why they wouldn't have children . It just sounded like they wanted to make women out to be gold diggers that don't want to work to earn their own money. Which is why I have asked further questions but they don't seem to want to answer them

I saw a thread that made me think of another potential reason why people are choosing not to have children and it was around not wanting to disrupt a child’s education by moving. The idea of having to think about schools - living near good ones, finding one your child gets along with, the implication of moving schools partway through a child’s education etc etc sounds like such a headache. Young, free, adventurous professionals who are used to moving around the world with their career are not going to take well to the opportunity cost of being tied down to a place due to schooling. Just a thought!

Oh, schools are much of a muchness. Brits are obsessed with Ofsted reports, ‘going private’ etc, but most schools are adequate and most kids will do fine at most. We’ve moved around a fair bit, and DS just goes to whatever school is closest.

In the world’s richest countries, women’s participation in the workforce has been falling. Data also clearly shows that their presence in the economy directly affects GDP.

The American economist Linda Scott says that the reason for this fall that we do not support working mothers; in fact we make it almost impossible for mothers to rejoin and stay in the labour force, we punish motherhood.

The motherhood premium is so high (women’s wages stall and drop after they have children) that increasing numbers of young women are deciding not to have children at all.

Nearly half of all countries are producing too few children to sustain their populations. This will have devastating consequences for their economies.

Affordable, high-quality childcare would pay for itself in rises in GDP. The costs would be covered by the tax revenue generated by working mothers. Affordable, state-sponsored childcare is not a gift to women, it is essential for world economies that want to thrive.

And before some respond that people should bring up their own children, in the UK today (and no doubt in Japan) most households require two wages to survive. And it seems odd to educate women at great expense only for them to be forced out of or into lower-paying jobs by motherhood.

Everyone knows this though?

The couples not having children don’t give a damn about GDP and falling tax revenue. They really don’t. It’s a personal choice (in most cases) towards a lower-stress, higher-disposable-income, more-freedom lifestyle.

We have more parent-friendly practices in the workplace than ever before: longer maternity leave (DM went back to work after 3 months), introduction of parental leave to allow fathers to step up, more WFH/flexi-working, greater and better quality childcare provision, heavily subsidised childcare for lower earners with the 30 free hours, and so on.

YET.

The birth rate continues to fall.

Because they have other life options. Contraception, abortion, career (or not) but ability to earn their own money, lack of maternal feelings, selfishness.

It's not necessarily due to selfishness..

A few issues here though: there’s little evidence that supporting working mothers translates into higher birth rates. France is often used to make this argument but iirc it just pushes the births earlier, but not necessarily increases the birth rate.

My pet theory is this is a result of reduced marriage rates due to lack of decent men to marry. Some women do have children on their own, but it is suboptimal and single motherhood itself has been associated with reduced lifetime fertility. For obvious reasons.

If we want higher birth rates, we must raise men to be decent, hardworking and interested in family formation at younger ages. MEN must be pressured on this, and women must not be pressured when there’s this lack of suitable men—society should not force us to ‘settle’ for inferior men.

I do worry that young women are now expected to work full time around very young children, while men often just work full time and shoulder far less of the load at home. Its become unaffordable for one parent to take 4 of 5 years at home before children start preschool.

Children aren't getting a good deal either, subsisting on poor quality cheap food at breakfast clubs, terrible school dinners and very basic teas at after school clubs, less time to play independently out doors and learn the sorts of household skills you pick up helping. I genuinely don't believe a nursery is the best environment for a child under 2. Until that age from a biological perspective really they are supposed to still be breastfed and primarily with their mother.

When we said we wanted freedom to choose a career etc, this isn't what we meant.

Fully agree.

I feel like there is this immense focus on "women want more childcare!!" as the only possible model for how to arrange things.

I love my career and I would love to be able to pause it for a few years with young kids and then ramp back up. But that's both financially extremely difficult in the immediate term, and also in my career there aren't ramp-back paths - once you're out, you're out and there is no way back. This is what I mean when I rant about "male pattern careers" - ones where there is an assumption that you never take a career break and you do your peak effort in your 30s.

By saying women have woken up to, people don’t mean women were clueless before. They mean women have realised that they have and have chosen to assert their choice.

life today enables women to make this choice in a way they couldn’t before.

and yes, children are a blessing when raised by a village. But today’s western society of nuclear families where there is no wider family to support each other thus placing the vast burden on one person is not healthy nor natural.

cover pay. Nannies, cleaners etc but because we are entitled and privileged but to replace what we have lost in our communities. But most people can’t afford these so it’s all on one person or if you are lucky with your choice of partner, two. Both probably working full time as well

Yes, definitely. The modern idea of only two people having to manage both looking after the children and working, rather than extended family and community, makes it very difficult. The UK is child-unfriendly in many ways, too.

The poster who mentioned that men are a big part of the problem is spot on - for me anyway. I would have loved to start my family earlier, and to have more children, but then DP was just never ‘ready’, despite us both being in well paid secure jobs, own home etc. Always said he wanted marriage and children, but not yet. Then when we had DChild, he walked out anyway. For me, that meant no more children.

The model where child benefit was universal and paid to the mother was a good one, rather than the ridiculous system we have right now. It gave women, including those who weren't earning, a higher degree of economic independence. There are too many threads with a husband or male partner earning six figures and his wife/female partner is struggling to buy the kids' school uniforms.

Every country in the world has a falling birth rate.
Some catastrophically so.
Its not about benefits or house prices or divorce
as the rates are falling even where none of those apply

I think social expectations are changing and women are choosing other paths through life. Overall a reduction in population could help long term. I’m ok with both really.

And I know about aging populations but we can’t keep going up.

The population is already falling in many countries
and globally is likely to start to fall within 20 years

Half of all the worlds children are currently born in sub Saharan Africa

Exactly. All the explanations that have been bandied around for the falling birth rate don’t explain why the birth rate is falling in places where those explanations don’t apply.

It is mostly down to women/couples exercising choice and choosing a child-free life. Some people can’t seem to accept that.

Another theory I've heard is that it's because of technological changes - too many people spending too much time socialising/being entertained online so they delay or don't get around to dating/marriage/kids.
I'm not entirely convinced, but it would explain why it's a worldwide phenomenon.

You've not been to rural areas in third world countries have you ...