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Child-free by choice: The birth rate crisis gripping the West (telegraph.co.uk)
With increasing numbers of women rejecting motherhood, governments are left scrambling to try and encourage a baby boom
“You’ve slept in, woken up to a tidy home, it’s quiet, and you’ve got the rest of the day to potter around, no interruptions. A child-free life is a good life.” The message floats over a video that captures a scene of serene domesticity. Posted on TikTok a few days ago, it has already racked up more than 100,000 views.
The video’s creator, “Danni ‘childfree’ Duncan”, is among those who have helped turn the decision not to have children into something of a movement, complete with its own hashtags (#childfreebychoice and #nothavingkids).
There are thousands of other young women posting similar content, including Nina, who sarcastically challenges the notion that as a #childfreemillennial she’s bound to feel “sad and worthless”, while playing a montage of her gloriously child-free travels to make her point. (Trigger warning: such videos are best avoided by exhausted parents in the throes of raising a family.)
It would be easy to dismiss these posts as a social media craze; something young people do to fill their time. Except this craze is just one small part of a wider, and highly significant, demographic issue: across much of the world, birth rates are plummeting.
On Nov 15 this year, the global population is expected to reach eight billion. The United Nations predicts it could grow to about 8.5 billion by 2030 before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s. After that – and some predict it will happen 20 years earlier – the world’s population will start to fall.
At a glance, you might conclude the greater cause for alarm is the impending arrival of even more people on our planet. As Population Matters, a UK charity warns, every additional person increases carbon emissions, not to mention demand on limited food and water resources, and ultimately pressure on borders and social security systems.
But, as averages often do, the headline figures obscure a different story. The few decades of projected global population growth that remain will be driven by a small number of undeveloped countries, many in the Sahel region of Africa. In countries like Niger, which has the world’s highest fertility rate, economic conditions remain so harsh that women continue to have an average of six or more children in order to survive.
In contrast, for most of the rest of the world – including Britain – it’s a baby bust. And it’s happening now. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women born in 1975 had on average just 1.92 children. This compared with the average 2.08 children produced by their mothers’ generation (taken as women born in 1949) and is far below the 2.1 children needed for the existing population to replace itself.
The picture is similar in most other developed countries. Last year, the French were urged to have more children after the number of births in the country slumped to its lowest level since the Second World War, with 1.83 children born per woman, compared with 2.02 more than a decade earlier. The birth rate in Spain also dropped to a historic low last year, hitting just 1.19 children born to every woman – a 29 per cent fall compared with a decade earlier.
And in parts of Asia the situation is even worse. South Korea’s fertility rate sank to its lowest ever in 2020, a meagre 0.84 children per woman, giving the country the lowest birth rate in the world.
So drastic is the decline that populations are expected to halve by 2100 in more than 20 countries, including Spain, Portugal and Japan. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla chief executive, has called it “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.
But why, when living standards and freedoms have never been higher, are women across the globe having so few children or rejecting the concept of motherhood altogether? And what if anything can policymakers do to reverse the trend?
Stresses, strains and changing attitudes
There is no doubt governments are worried. Earlier this month, an unnamed cabinet minister suggested Britain might take its lead from Hungary, where women receive tax cuts for having more children. “Bonk for Britain” urged the headline in the Sun on Sunday, which quoted the minister saying: “Look at the labour shortages we are suffering from. We need to have more children. The rate keeps falling.”
It does; but the reasons are many and varied, extending beyond the financial to changing social attitudes and modern lifestyles.
It starts with economics. In undeveloped countries like Niger, where subsistence agriculture dominates, people have large numbers of children to help support the family and look after them in their old age.
But, as countries develop, they all pass a point at which the birth rate begins to fall. It’s the point at which it makes more economic sense to invest in the education of just a couple of children. With a doctor or lawyer in the family the future becomes a whole lot more secure.
This typified northern hemisphere countries for the latter part of the last century but, more recently, development appears to have nudged things too far, disincentivising procreation.
In many countries, including Britain, children have become very expensive to raise and, as Professor Geeta Nargund, president of the International Society for Mild Approaches in Assisted Reproduction, wrote in a 2009 paper on declining birth rates in developed countries, “children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost[s]”.
The 2007/08 financial crash didn’t help. “Particularly in Europe [this] led to… unemployment [and] poor accumulation of wealth by young adults,” says Lyman Stone, chief information officer at Demographic Intelligence.
Economic stresses and spiralling house prices mean more couples will feel they can’t afford children, he explains. Indeed, there is data to suggest that in many countries, including the UK, US, Japan and Germany, couples tend to have fewer children than they would like.
But there’s also a complex blend of cultural factors to consider. “One of the biggest drivers is changing marital trends,” says Stone. “As people marry later and have children later, that leads to lower fertility.”
And among the reasons for later marriage is adults remaining in education for longer, he says. “People tend not to get married until they have a certain level of stability, and [university] postpones that. As we’re creating a society that demands people have more years of [education], we’re postponing marriage and so postponing childbirth, and then people may have more difficulties conceiving because they’re getting older.”
Attitudes are important too. In the 1950s, as populations in the west boomed, the cult of the nuclear family took hold, with dad diligently working nine-to-five and mum raising the 2.4 children between keeping the house clean with an array of modern gadgets that – allegedly – took the drudgery out of housework. But we live in a different world now and Stone cites a trio of modern attitudes that work against parenthood.
One is high-intensity parenting – which involves investing much time and money into each child. This “Tiger Mother” version of raising children puts prospective parents off, says Stone.
“We’ve made parenting very hard these days,” he says. “It’s treated like a research project: you have to read all these books, not feed them this, do feed them that. Parenting anxiety is a real reason people don’t have kids. They think parenting is really hard.”
Then there’s the rise of “leisurism” – lifestyles focused on leisure pursuits. In some of its surveys, Demographic Intelligence has asked respondents to agree or disagree with statements like “I’m working on myself right now”, “my hobbies are important to me” and “I want to have extra money so I can travel”.
“We find a considerable share of people have leisurist mindsets,” says Stone, “so it’s very important to them to have a lot of leisure time, and time to focus on their own wellbeing and development. We find that with people who have these views, it negatively affects their fertility, meaning they desire fewer children and don’t even have as many children as they desire.”
The reverse of the leisurist coin is the “workist” mindset, in which you value your job very highly as a source of meaning and purpose in your life. Like leisurism, it is not hugely compatible with parenthood. More than one study has suggested a correlation between workist attitudes – which Stone says are prevalent among a growing share of adults – and lower fertility.
But it’s not just that the 1950s ideal of family life is fading. Today there is a fast-growing cohort that actively rejects the idea of having children. They are “childfree by choice”, and proud of it.
A survey last year by the Pew Research Center in the US found a rising share of childless American adults said they were unlikely to ever start a family. Some 44 per cent of non-parents aged 18 to 49 fell into this category, up from 37 per cent in 2018. While some cited financial reasons, climate change or their lack of a partner as a reason, the majority (56 per cent) said they probably wouldn’t have children because they just didn’t want to.
It’s a group that’s becoming more vocal. In 2015 and 2017, the NotMom Summit – billed as one of the world’s first major conferences for women without children – was held in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2021, Erin Spurling, a British woman in her mid-30s, created the Childfree Lounge, an online community for women without children. “Having children should be a choice, not something you do because everyone else thinks you should,” she told The Daily Telegraph after launching.
It’s not hard to find other British women who feel the same. “I’ve never wanted children and never wavered from that,” says Beth McCloughlin, 45, a copywriter from south-east London. “I love my freedom, spontaneity and peace and quiet. I value time alone. I have a low tolerance of routine and mundane tasks.”
She echoes the frustration felt by many like her, at being asked to explain herself for straying from the default expectation for women. “When people ask me if I never wanted children and why, I feel like they’d just asked me why I’ve never chosen to be an astronaut or move to Iraq. I simply never felt the urge to do so and tolerate the sacrifices.”
Gail Hugman from Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, founder of education business Lessons Alive, always knew she didn’t want her own children. “Every ‘childbearing year’ of my life, I would ask myself if I was sure about the decision,” she says. “And in fleeting moments of regret, I know in my heart it was the right one.”
Pronatal planning
Policymakers beg to differ. Worried by demographic headwinds, a number of countries have launched “pronatalist” initiatives. These are often financial in nature, such as the family allowance offered by the French state to families with at least two children under 20 (the amount of which varies by income), or the tax exemption for mothers of four or more in Hungary.
Poland’s Family 500+ programme offers parents a tax-free benefit of 500 Polish zloty (£91) per month for their second and any subsequent children. In Seoul, South Korea, pregnant women receive rewards of 700,000 won (£436) in transportation vouchers. Singapore, facing a steep decline in its birth rate, has even tried matchmaking couples in the hope of socially engineering a baby boom.
Other pronatalist policies focus on childcare provision and parental leave, with the Nordic nations often praised for their generous support. In Sweden, every pre-school child is entitled to childcare from age one, the cost of which is capped. In Norway, the maximum price for kindergarten is 3,050 kroner (£255) a month. In London, by contrast, it is not unusual to pay upwards of £1,000 a month for a private nursery.
Given British childcare is among the most expensive in the world, costs here inevitably affect family planning. Recent research by Pregnant Then Screwed, a charity aimed at “ending pregnancy and maternity discrimination”, found almost one in five women who had had an abortion cited childcare prices as the main reason.
Thus far, British policies have not exactly screamed “please have more children”. In 2017, the Conservative government introduced a two-child limit that restricted some benefit payments to the first two children born to the poorest households. Child benefits are also tapered if the higher earning parent makes more than £50,000, and removed completely if they earn above £60,000.
Given the UK’s population is on course to peak at 75 million in 2063 and predicted to fall to 71 million by 2100, is it time we followed the lead of other countries in adopting a pronatal approach? The reality is that initiatives elsewhere have had a limited effect. Birth rates are still falling. Following the introduction of Poland’s 500+ scheme in 2016, they did rise, but not enough to offset the problems of an ageing population.
Pronatalist policies, moreover, raise some uneasy questions: should the state really have a role in influencing women’s decisions about their bodies? Doesn’t it have touches of Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale? And do such policies even have racist overtones? There was, you’ll recall, a party in the 1930s that wanted to increase indigenous births to grow its so-called “Aryan” population.
But countries with shrinking working populations start to rely on immigration – and this brings problems of its own.
Today, some on the Far Right subscribe to the “great replacement theory” – the ethno-nationalist idea that white populations are being supplanted by non-white immigrants. Extremists like Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people when he attacked two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, have used it to justify violence.
Any treatment or discussion of the birth-rate problem requires, then, a sensitive and careful approach. Introducing pronatalist policies worth having for their own sake, aside from their possible effect on procreation, could be a way forward.
“In general it’s good to provide broad structural support for child-rearing, such as a generous child allowance,” says Stone. “[And] we need to make sure housing is affordable.” There may even be positives, with technology allowing societies to exist with fewer workers and less stress being placed on the environment. In his recent book Decline and Prosper! – Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children, demographic expert Vegard Skirbekk presents the baby bust as a positive overall. We must, he argues, ultimately adapt to a world with fewer children.
