A study has discovered that almost half of UK adults aged between 18 and 50 are not intending on having children, with the birth rate set to plummet.
Some 46 per cent of those polled by Ipsos said they’d settled against children or didn’t plan to have any more.
More than half said this was for financial reasons. Two-thirds cited personal reasons, such as being too young or too old or feeling discouraged at the possibility.
Britain’s birth rate has plunged to 1.61 children per woman, compared with 1.94 a decade ago. Experts say this will mean the population will hit a peak of 71 million in the 2040s before falling to 57 million by 2100, a level that was last seen in 1989.
The declining rate will leave Britain with an ageing populace, provoking fears of additional strain on the NHS and care system and an undermining of economic development, but environmentalists believe a shrinking population will cut carbon emissions and improve quality of life, and that voids in the labour market will be sufficed by robots and computers.
Sixty-two per cent of adults surveyed said decreasing the cost of childcare or making it complimentary would encourage people to have more children.
Childcare is more costly in Britain than almost anywhere else in the rich world, amounting to more than half the earnings of the average parent according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In most European countries it’s well below 20 per cent.
A falling birth rate isn’t unusual in the United Kingdom. Fertility is declining across much of the developed world, with South Korea having the lowest figure of 0.81 children per woman.
France, however, has a much higher rate than most similar developed countries, at about 1.8 children per woman. Experts think this is because the country offers more parental leave and an affordable method of childcare.
Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation think tank, said that in much of the rest of the world, birth rates had been declining in the United Kingdom for several years, and to some degree, that probably reflected more options and greater freedom, better economic opportunities, stronger reproductive rights, and weaker social pressure.
He said that at the same time, people normally say they would like to have more children than they end up having, which indicates considerable barriers of cost, as well as working and living conditions that might not be amenable to starting a family.
However, the increasing expense of child care and other costs doesn’t appear to be a concern for immigrants now in the United Kingdom because the statistics for fertility rates are generally higher for immigrant mothers, and the world as a whole is a mess and overpopulated, so I can understand why people are choosing against having children now.
Nonetheless, we do now have an ageing population, and the potential for a declining birth rate, so I can’t condemn people for not wanting to have children.
The country is in a state, full of anguished families that can’t afford a mortgage or childcare, which can, unfortunately, end up costing more than a mortgage.
To be honest, if I had my time again, I wouldn’t want to bring children into this world either. I mean, why would anyone want to bring children into this cesspit of a country?
It’s the soaring cost of house prices that makes life extremely costly, caused in part by immigrants, with millions of them arriving, driving up house prices by the law of supply and demand.
Forty years ago, it was possible to purchase a house on a mortgage and raise a family on a one-person salary. Now house prices have doubled in real terms, meaning that you need two paychecks to buy a house, but then with the mother working, you would need to employ childcare, which is also costly.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 