Young women having fewer children and having them later in life, ONS says

There are zero incentives to have children young, most young people are not financially stable at all

Why would you have a kid under 30 if you can’t even afford a house?

Where would you keep it – in your houseshare bedroom or at your parents’?

The other factor is that you can’t survive on a single income now, so both parties have to work. Cost of childcare. Cost of living in general.

Governments and super-rich “wow I’m shocked less people are having kids in a bad economy”

Tax avoidance & evasion. Using loopholes and offshore accounts to pay less tax.

Low wages & zero-hour contracts. Keeping wages low while profits rise.

Wealth hoarding. Accumulating assets without reinvesting in society.

Property speculation. Driving up house prices and rents.

Underfunding public services. Cutting healthcare, education, and welfare.

Lobbying & political influence. Shaping laws to benefit the wealthy

All to keep inequality high and people unhappy and poor. Low birth rate is the consequence of a bad and unfair political and economic system that helps the rich and punishes the poor.

Anyone surprised?

Cost of living is bad enough on your own and sometimes with a partner. Bringing a kid in makes it all the more worse.

If wages weren’t wank and everything wasn’t so dreadfully overpriced you might not have this issue. 

Until they make having children more affordable then there will be less people having them

Hmm I wonder why, perhaps because it’s career suicide, and scraping by in life now requires minimum two people working full time, and childcare costs are £1000+ a month per child?

Around 30 years ago my Mum had four children as a single parent while working part time to pay off a mortgage and studying for a degree (for free). Her house cost about 40,000. It’s now worth nearly £700,000. None of her adult children, even one working a very high paid job with no children, could afford to buy the house from her today. If by some miracle they were simply handed a deposit for the house, they could not afford the mortgage and the childcare costs of a single child. Never mind 4.

I pay £500 a month, just for extra curricular activities for my children. I can’t see how younger people are supposed to pay for childcare, extras and living expenses, as well as trying to find somewhere to live. Why would they have children, we have squeezed everyone.

Make having children affordable, and life more enjoyable, for the general population as we’re all stressed out our tits trying to make ends meet we have no time or energy for just the sex part, let alone the results of it…

The only way to change this would be more social housing. This would free up more money so one parent can afford to stay home and not pay exorbitant child minding fees.
It would also have the added bonus of saturating the property rental market so private rents would go down too.

There’s no way the current government would do this though. Corbyn might have.

Society where large chunks in supposed decent careers cannot afford to realistically own a home or have any real job security decide adding kids to the mix might not be a great idea.

More as we get it.

The world is fucked and you’re surprised people don’t want to bring anymore children into it?

Not a surprise that, most of the women in my office tend to be mid 30s when they’re going on maternity leave for the first time

Not having children the end. Too expensive and a financial burden, id love to have to, but when your already living hand to mouth in this terrible country i wouldn’t want to bring a child up into poverty. Its not fair on children.

I’m a Mum of 3 at 45. My eldest is 16, we made the conscious decision to have a family regardless of the financial consequences in 2009 right after the financial crash. We decided to move to a cheaper area, we have been extremely frugal, almost everything we have is used, holidays are built down to the shiniest penny and definitely do not happen every year, I have scores and scores of A4 pads where every penny is accounted for and any new or big up and coming expenditure is noted.

There has been no medals for this action and I honestly don’t know if we were both 29 years old again, when I had my first, if even that plan would come off at all in the way that it did when we started. Yes the 2008 crisis was a big off-putting monolith, but we decided that world finances should not influence when we start a family. Personally, one is far more important than the other.

One of my nephews is 26. He has a good degree and is just starting in his field. But when I have asked him about his own place, moving out from his parents, he looked at me like I was speaking Swahili. The concept of moving out from under his parents’ roof is completely incompatible given how much he can earn. He even recently split up with a girl because she said she wanted kids. While he does too, he wants to do it only when he can assuredly keep the roof over their heads and be some way assured that his job is stable enough to do it. I completely understand that and get where he’s coming from. But unlike my husband and I who are in reality on the cusp of Generation X and Millennial, at least we sort of had a vague plan. In truth, plan 1 failed, plan 2 didn’t go to plan, plan 3 was a washout, plan 4 was an initial abortive attempt at plan 5, plan 6 just sort of happened so we call it a plan instead of calling it what it really is, which is “it just happened that way!”

The thing is, my nephew can’t move to a cheaper area, he’s in the cheaper area. He can’t move roles, he’s tied to the NHS trust that he works at. If he did move to a cheaper area, he would be going way out in the middle of nowhere, where the only thing to get to know are sheep and cows.

The pressures on young people today I fully believe are monstrous. I’m only glad I’m not 20 years old anymore having to think about these decisions.

On the same page, however, my eldest son is 16. While he has a plan, a-levels then some career involving chemical engineering, will he ever be able to do the family thing?

It’s all well and good printing article after article about women not having children, but when it is by design of this corporate entity we call a country, what can a young person do? Most girls, despite social media’s claims, do indeed want to have children and families. Most young girls have bought into the myth that they can have the career and the designer children both. But when that reality comes crashing down and the men are struggling to even establish themselves at all in the first place, of course we are seeing a population decrease.

My honest advice, and I speak as a woman who used to be a bra burning feminist and still am to some degree, I would heavily advise any young people out there to just start your families when you want them. Regardless of living situation, regardless of career, regardless of incomes, just start. Because right now is the last best time and you don’t want it to wait until it gets even worse. There are ways to save money in having children and most of all, I cannot express enough how much I deeply and completely will never regret stopping working in order to raise my family while my husband works, despite the fact we don’t have nice things, despite the fact that holidays are bi-annually at best and budgeted down to a number, despite the fact that my youngest 10 year old boy is sat around in clothing we bought from a charity shop for his older brother six years ago or more, just do it! Don’t let the corporations that the likes of Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak or Boris Bonehead are in bed with dictate your fertility top you!

So this is the actual crisis, our demographics are terrifying, we have a growing elderly population and collapsing birth rates. It’s likely the thing that drives all the mainstream parties into encouraging immigration but it’s not spoken about much at all.

The UK needs to be talking about our demographics but we are largely silent on the issue. It’s actually a very strange thing.

I remember the late 90’s early 00’s when teenage pregnancy was the talking point. Now they’re not having them quick enough. Is there an allowable period of time that women won’t be judged for?

The birth rate is below replacement now so it’s up to the government if it wants to help people have kids in the UK or we need to ‘fund the boats’ to get more immigrants.

Childcare, housing and healthcare (yes the NHS exists but if you want a specialist you have to go private) all conspire to make parenting untenable until you’re really in your 30’s.

Could it be the cost of the child and childcare. Negbit must young people aren’t fucking that’s the problem.

-health minister

There are many who simply can’t afford to start a family. Jobs don’t pay enough and the cost of housing and childcare are extortionate. I have no desire to have children but if I did it would only be in the last few years where I was in a position in my life and career where it would even be a possibility and still then it would be a struggle.

If you can’t afford to have children then ultimately I believe it is selfish to have them.

These headlines always crack me up.

The media spent DECADES along with the government (See tories) yelling at young people, calling them every name under the sun, for having the audacity to reproduce at a younger age thereby supposedly being irresponsible for not considering the financial implications, for being reckless, for adding to the taxpayer burden in terms of education, childcare, etc (despite what they add when they are grown).

So now young people have wizened up to the environmental issues and have stopped having kids in large enough numbers to keep the population stable, focused on their careers, waited tirelessly until they are financially stable (unlikely to happen but still), and stared into the abyss of environmental concerns like the political and climate crisis that is ever brewing harder deciding to dodge the bullet…

and all the old people can do is scream like harpes and say “fuck your finances and ability to eat, we want grandkids”.

Won’t this result in something like Japan or Korea have going on? Where there are way less young people to replace the ageing population

People can’t afford the basics nowadays! My grandfather bought a house in Surrey and he was the sole wage earner. I looked up the address to check the house price and it’s well over £600k now.
Hell, I’m worried that I won’t be able to afford RENT as utilities have all gone up.

If a mother gives up a poorly paid job to save herself £1000 a month, then that saving is better than being paid £250 a week tax free – isn’t it?

Have children in the shit hole country? Ha, no thanks, I’ll spare them the suffering.