“Non è un bel mondo là fuori”: i tassi di natalità hanno toccato il minimo degli ultimi 50 anni
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgzdq23xpgo?xtor=AL-71-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_campaign_type=owned&at_ptr_name=twitter&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_link_origin=BBCNews&at_link_type=web_link&at_medium=social&at_format=link&at_link_id=2E024FBE-59ED-11F1-9817-BABBC8CB323D&at_campaign=Social_Flow
di tylerthe-theatre
41 commenti
Can’t afford stable housing so can’t afford a stable life and a child. Blame private landlords buying up the starter houses that would have been used for me to start a family but instead go to boomer cruises. Landlords are the death of the native Brit.
Birthrates typically fall when there is economic insecurity and distrust. Consider that 1976 was around the time the IMF bailout occurred. that’s some hard hitting reality
They told us not to have kids unless we can afford them. Shocking that the birth rate falls when most of us can’t afford them 🤣
>”If I’d had children, I’d have had to reduce my hours at work,” she says.
“I’m a huge traveller and go away whenever I can in my camper van, which I wouldn’t be able to do if I had children.”
>”They’re waiting for a better job, better salary, better house, better neighbourhood, and it takes longer to get those things in the current climate,” she adds.
>”Even in the Nordics, with [their] family-friendly social policies, they don’t see an increase in birth rates,” she says.
Go back more than 2 or 3 generations and the average person’s ancestor lived a much more impoverished life than they do. While economic factors do certainly sting, this is mainly downstream of cultural changes. People want a certain standard of living more than they want kids.
Maybe if we didn’t have to rely on a household having two full time incomes to just live a average life quality then kids might be more of an option. Past generations could afford to buy homes and food on a single income.
Birth rates are never going to get back to the days where the average family would have 10+ kids even if you fix the economy.
People have better lives now and as a result more choices.
We need to ween our financial system off an ever growing employee to retiree ratio.
Claims world is horrible place – chooses not to have kids so she has time to see it
We’re having a child not because we can 100% afford it comfortably, but because the grandparents will always provide it with a financial safety net if we fall on massively hard times.
I would wager a vast majority of people my age aren’t privileged enough to have that luxury.
Its an absolutely shit world to bring up a child in yes.
I feel like this ‘it isn’t a nice world’ thing is an excuse people throw out there for not having children and i’ve no clue why. Don’t want them, don’t have them! But living standards are high compared to previous decades and it’s a bit ignorant to pretend otherwise.
It’s hard when you’re not able to afford suitable housing or childcare, I do get that element.
Blair’s ‘essay’ that he’s released today is so tone deaf to this tidal wave of news about the failure of the economic model he championed.
Everyone here saying “I can’t afford children” not one (that I have seen on this thread so far) saying: “if it’s this bad now, what’s it going to be like when the child grows up”
It’s going to be a rough 70 years unless things take a positive turn (unlikely) – that is a reason to not have kids!
It’s mad that we act like falling birth rates are some mysterious cultural problem when it’s basically a giant spreadsheet issue. Wages flat, rents and house prices exploding, childcare costing more than a second mortgage, pensions tied to endlessly rising house values, and every bit of “risk” pushed onto individuals while companies and landlords hoover up the upside. People aren’t suddenly anti‑kids, they’re just doing the maths and realising bringing a child into permanent precarity is brutal. If a government genuinely cared about birth rates, they’d go after housing costs, job security and childcare first instead of lecturing people about avocado toast and putting off adulthood
There’s gotta be someone deciding this because it makes no sense
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I knew by 21 I was never bringing kids into this world
Where will these imaginary kids live lol, we can’t afford the property to leave them, two full time jobs needed just to survive, procreation is for the very rich or the benefits brigade who have social housing
Economics of course play a part, but the single biggest factor behind birth rates falling across the world is women’s education. Women don’t want to give up their lives and careers to have children (justifiably), especially as so many of us young women witnessed our mothers both working full-time and still being the primary caregiver for any children. Plenty of my friends don’t want the same life.
Every third space you could think of is dead or too expensive. How are people to meet?
House prices are so high youd be mid thirties if youre lucky in many cases.
Wages have stagnated and compressed.
Fuel, utility bills are eye watering high.
Jobs are getting cut day after day.
What do you expect.
My friends have two children.
It made more financial sense for one of them to quit their job so that they would qualify for free nursery placements than it did for them to both work full time and pay for nursery.
Me and my partner both work full time, can’t afford a mortgage and certainly wouldn’t be able to afford to put a child through nursery.
The system is broken
There is more than enough people in England. You import enough young people where birth rates don’t even matter
Scotland however could do with more births from Scots. Our house prices are also much more affordable. My toddler is not in the slightest a financial burden.
I actually want kids, but have to wait 7 months to see a urologist about a diagnosed fertility issue
I don’t think people realise how behind many countries are on this issue. South Korea is always used as the example for this topic, but their birth rate is actually increasing quite consistently and will soon be on par with most European countries.
And of course, SK isn’t reliant on immigration to help boost the numbers, so they’ve had to actually work towards more foundational solutions.
Are they perfect? No. But there is a far greater effort and more candid recognition of the problem than you’re seeing in other places.
Maybe sort the benefits out for childcare and more will have kids. It’s a massive black hole financially for 3-4 years which the government does so little to help with, especially compared to other European countries.
What’s funny is life was objectively worse back when birth rates were higher. Some of the worst places to live on earth have the highest birth rates.
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Was it any better out there in the last 2000 years?
Paternity leave is still the worst in Europe.
Northern Ireland recently announced miscarriage leave for mothers and fathers.
That’s a great development but the terrible irony is that for a miscarriage you’d get 2 weeks off at full pay – for a live birth it’s 2 weeks stat pay.
More to it than just cant afford it. As mentioned by the person in the article
“I’m a huge traveller and go away whenever I can in my camper van, which I wouldn’t be able to do if I had children.”
Travel has never been as easy, and people realise kids tie you down which some dont want
>’It’s not a nice world to bring children into’
We are at the best and safest time in human history, so no I don’t buy that
>’I get to travel blah blah blah’
So you want to have you cake and eat it, starting a family comes with sacrifices, yeah life is expensive, life has always been expensive for many at one point during the past 100 years, people cope people get on raising families
There are too many people on the planet. The natural environment cannot accommodate any more people. Overpopulation is a massive source of instability. It’s good that birth rates are declining.
Hopefully we will see an end to the growth in human population. it will solve many of today’s problems.
We’ve been telling everyone why we’re waiting. Address the issues that stop people from having children and birth rate fixed. Easy.
Better free/lower cost childcare. Better m/paternity leave. Address the cost of living/ house prices.
Its not rocket science. Going all handmaid’s tale wont solve anything.
People think those are difficult things to fix but thats only because the people who benefit from it being unfair want it that way. The fact that its like pulling teeth trying to get fair taxation from corporations and large land owners tells us that. None of is average people have a hope of affecting anything while they carry on.
As someone who came to realisation kids weren’t on the cards here are the main things a single man in his mid 30s chose
1. Meeting someone when your both ready is painful and dating apps are getting really weird and I am not an attractive middle age man (probably the main point)
2. Everyone who has kids fucking complains about them all the time, it looks like a pain in the ass
3. I want more, I’ve been undersold at every major precipice (left school 2007 BOOM Recession, mid 2010s BREXIT, 2020 COVID, 2022+ SHITSHOW WARS GENECIDES AND NOT VERY GOOD TIMES) and that’s not including all of the previous national and international issues we just had to “soldier on through”,
Have the above been major factors, yes and no in different ways it’s certainly influenced it and put the needle in the “very unlikely to happen portion” of the scale,
I’ve chose my house, my career, travelling, weekend fun and holidays, I chose not to have kids, who’s needs kids when you can have fun
The reality is we have gone from a society were even the average worker could afford a house, family and retirement to within a few generations turning into one in which probably half of millennials and gen z will get none of those options.
Our entire economy is like one big failing company these days. We all know it’s heading down the drain in the next 20-30 years but no politician is brave enough to change course from the neoliberal model which has got us here.
Oh well. Governments can blame no-one but themselves. Meanwhile, I’m happy in the knowledge that I won’t be burdening any poor children with this shit show of a world and system.
I refuse to stop eating avocado on toast, unfortunately
Walking around in like the fifth consecutive yearly annual “unprecedented” heatwave has made me think thank god I don’t have kids because I really dunno what sort of changes will happen as a result of global warming.
I don’t want them anyway to be fair. And I can fully admit it’s for selfish reasons like “wanting to enjoy my own life.” I’ve never looked at a parent and felt jealous of their life tbh. Good for parents who want kids and have them – all power to you! But it’s not for me.
this is a bigger problem but the boomers want their £200 winter beer allowance so here we are!
Birth rate might be down, but luckily we get a new immigrant every 1.4 minutes.
If the government cares so much about birth rates, then they should give people resources and circumstances conducive to having children and raising them. Pretty simple stuff.
Why did it fall so sharply in the mid 70’s and 2000?
Maybe people are having less children because there’s less pressure to have them.