If You Want Us To Have Babies, Fix The World
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
For people in their 20s, It’s hard enough to imagine still being alive in 2050, let alone imagine their children growing up. The future is distant and bleak, and a baby shortage will only make it worse. It’s a vicious cycle – worse future prospects mean fewer babies, and fewer babies mean a worse future. The answer is not pushing women to have children, the answer is fixing the mess we are in.
The think tank Social Market Foundation warned the UK of a baby shortage bringing in “long-term economic stagnation”. Fewer young workers joining the labour market will weaken the economy and bring in less tax revenue, all while the number of people over 65, who are dependent on them, will rise from one-fifth of the population to one-quarter by 2050.
While politicians are avoiding finding solutions, focusing on more urgent crises, of which there are many, other people come up with all the wrong solutions. In an article for the Times, Demographer Paul Morland suggested creating “a national day to celebrate parenthood” and “a telegram from the Queen whenever a family has a third child”. Problem solved. And if anyone is still having doubts, he’d introduce a “negative child benefit tax” for people without children.
Instead of trying to influence a deeply personal choice with the threat of punishment, we need to look at how birthrates have reacted to child support policies in the past. Even in the 1930s, women said they were not having children because of the lack of money, support, housing, and security. In the 2000s, the New Labour Government managed to get the fertility rate – the average number of children per woman – from 1.7 to 1.9 by introducing child tax credits, free nurseries, and Sure Start centres. After the Coalition Government came into power in 2010, austerity policies and a more precarious job market pushed the fertility rate down to 1.6 in England and Wales and 1.3 in Scotland.
Right now, the future seems impossible. It feels like saving up for a mortgage takes longer than raising a child and the prospect of feeding a family seems incompatible with paying the energy bills. As the cost of living protesters has been saying: the choice is between heating and eating this winter. And the current gig and freelance economy don’t inspire a lot of financial confidence in potential parents. New Statesman reports that “the average house price is 65 times higher than in 1970 but average wages are only 36 times higher”. Childcare is not free either. An average UK couple spends 29% of their wage on childcare, almost three times as much as most other OECD countries.
On top of it all, more familiar to Generation Z than any other generation, there is the anxiety caused by the climate crisis. According to the Office for National Statistics, 75% of people in the UK were worried about climate change. Men were a bit calmer with only 72% of them being worried, as opposed to 79% of women. Many said they were worried for their family and future generations. That’s not the ideal atmosphere for starting families, and the data confirms it – four in ten young people are “hesitant to have children as a result of the climate crisis”.
What a tragic time it is, when the question of having children has become a moral question: is it better not to be born at all than to live in this world? So instead of trying to punish childless couples with taxes or bribing them with meaningless rewards, let’s fix the world. Only that will alleviate young people’s anxiety about the future and give them hope that their potential children might have a chance at a good life in an equal, caring society. Give people energy-efficient affordable houses, and free childcare, tie salaries to inflation, and don’t take the 2050 climate pledges for a joke.
