It wasn’t very long ago that having three children, as I have, was considered not a good thing.
In just 2021 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced they were stopping at two for environmental reasons, rather than for the traditional reason of being totally knackered. This ‘stopping at two’ was enough to get them an award from the environmental British charity Population Matters (just don’t mention the private jets guys). When you visit the Population Matters website (patrons include Sir David Attenborough) you’re shown a terrifying collection of quotes, facts and stats which essentially spell out: “Stop having babies you feckless lot, you’re ruining everything!” The message was clear – there’s too many humans and we all just need to stop for a bit.
Well, the message seems to have got through, because across the developed world people have done exactly that. The UK birth rate is now the lowest it has ever been, with just 1.49 children now being born per woman. This downward trend is happening all over Europe as well as South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Japan and the USA.
Before we all celebrate this as a win for Sir David, some say this is now not a good thing. We have done a dramatic 180 turn on having babies and people are describing the situation as ‘bleak’, ‘dystopian’, and ‘ominous’. Fears over labour shortages, economic decline, technological stagnation, school closures and future pensioners being abandoned are all cited as reasons to fear falling birth rates.
The drop in birth rate is “one of the greatest crises facing western democracies”, said Sebastian Payne, director of UK thinktank Onward. “Many of our challenges in the years ahead will worsen if our birth rate is left to wither.”
A pronatalist movement has emerged in the USA with Elon Musk, father of 11, being the most famous. He said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “The biggest problem that humanity faces is population collapse.”
The pronatalist attitude is also gaining traction in the UK with the declining birth rate being described in terms like ‘collapse’ and ‘catastrophic’. Efforts are being made across France, Italy, Singapore and Hungary to encourage both better health in the ageing population (retirement age is set to go up) but also to encourage more babies. Suddenly my three children look like a benevolent gift.
I gave birth on hospital wards so overcrowded that midwives encouraged me home hours after difficult labours. Too much of my last decade has been spent trying, and often failing, to get my children into oversubscribed nurseries, schools and after-school clubs. We spent two years on a waiting list for our catchment primary school before giving up. We made offers on houses only to be told there were at least 25 better offers on the table. I have experienced nothing but brutal competition, and then disappointment, when it comes to finding everything from a home to school places, swimming lessons, football clubs, NHS dentists and even appointments to get new school shoes fitted.
This low-level anxiety has been the background hum to my life for nearly two decades which is why I find it incredibly hard to imagine a time when schools will be forced close because there aren’t enough children to fill a class. It’s predicted hundreds of primary schools will close by the end of the decade, even in heavily populated places like London. My untested theory about the Labour Party policy to introduce VAT on private schools is because they know they’ll have to close secondary schools in the coming decade if children don’t move over to state education.
It’s predicted in 2025 there will be more deaths in the UK than births. While not every demographer is as pessimistic about this shift as Elon Musk, what we can all agree on is that family life is about to look very different.
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
