Why do you think women worldwide are having fewer babies?

[KateMumsnet]

Hello all

We've been approached by an academic researcher at the Oxford Centre for Research into Parenting and Children who's working on a book called 'No Time For Children'. The book will explore why fertility rates - the number of babies being born per mother - are actually falling the world over, despite a widespread belief to the contrary. 

In China, for example, the worried government is reversing its one-child policy - but many adult 'onelies' now believe that one child is 'about right'. The same is true in Japan and Singapore, and fertility rates are also falling in Africa,  Europe, Latin America and all over Eastern Asia. 

The book will contain chapters written by an impressive roster of academic contributors, but its authors would also like to hear what mothers themselves think is going on, and what, specifically, they consider to be the barriers to having more children. If you'd like to contribute, please do post your thoughts here. 

[juneau]

I have two children and don't plan on having any more. It's a lifestyle choice. We want to be able to privately educate our kids, we want to have nice holidays, and we're looking forward to being through the small kid stage so that life gets more fun again, as having little kids is bloody hard work and has impacted quite negatively on our previously very happy marriage.

Most of my friends are the same - in fact I only have one friend who has more than three children and she and her husband are strict Catholics. Everyone else has between one and three and they're happy to stop there. I also have several friends who don't want any and say it's because it looks like such hard work and they love their lives just as they are.

I don't know why women worldwide are having fewer kids, but I suspect it's because many women now have choices they never had before. They can choose to work and they can have a life outside the home that wouldn't have been possible for their mothers/grandmothers, and they're choosing to have fewer children so they can develop these other areas of their lives.

[Bandwithering]

Do Catholics still believe that? that contraception is bad? I mean has any of their teaching been revised at all?

[ragged]

IVF is also unacceptable, Bandwithering, anything that interferes with natural conception is out, I think. So Clomid or even treatment for PCOS might be questionable. That's why it's okay for gay men with HIV to use condoms, but not heterosexual couples .

[Bandwithering]

oh right. I should know this being Irish and living in Ireland, but almost everybody ignores it all.... so I still don't know. I know a girl who told me if she couldn't have kids she'd just accept it. But then she went on to have ivf.

[ElaineM67]

Bandwithering> Yes, you are completely right about it being easy to get back to careers, if you are earning enough to hire a nanny. But what's the point, if you miss your child growing up? I have a lot of friends with careers who didn't have children precisely for this reason.

[Rhubarbgarden]

I think the attitude of men is a big issue. I know so many single women in their thirties who can't get boyfriends because the guys think 'ooh, woman in her thirties, must be desperate to have kids' so they go out with twenty year olds instead and keep clubbing till they're forty. And I know many happy couples where the woman would dearly like to have kids but the guy thinks he's too young. Then wham - they reach late thirties, the women finally realise they need to put some pressure on, if the guys are sufficiently committed they finally accept that body clocks are ticking and you get a rash of weddings quickly followed by trips to IVF clinics. It's simply too late to have more than one or two children.

Secondly, lack of support. My family is too distant, disinterested or dead to be of any help. Much as I would like more than two children, I couldn't cope on my own.