“Momento di transizione davvero”: cosa dovremmo fare per il calo dei tassi di fertilità?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/30/policy-challenges-declining-fertility-rates-england-wales-ageing-population
di Remarkable_Peak9518
“Momento di transizione davvero”: cosa dovremmo fare per il calo dei tassi di fertilità?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/30/policy-challenges-declining-fertility-rates-england-wales-ageing-population
di Remarkable_Peak9518
35 commenti
I don’t know, maybe sort out the economy so that people can afford to raise a child?
What is sad is the absolute bile you see from some (mainly older) people whenever there is an article about increasing parental leave or removing the two child benefit cap.
The policies needed to improve birth rates will never happen as the old bitter selfish fuckers will never allow it.
“The UK population is predicted to grow to 86 million by 2100, fuelled by net migration (without migration, it is modelled to fall to 48 million) so Hill argues there is little concern about a declining workforce in the short term.”
Does raise other pretty major political questions though? We already have a political system approaching a gerontocracy due to younger people not voting and at least 20% of the working age population not being able to, what’s that going to be like with the latter figure said to reach over 50%?
That doesn’t just affect immigrants, I want my British kids to have a future and be able to change things not just be slaving at the whims of this old bastard when they’re in their 20s.
Are we really talking “fertility” rates, or just the birth rate?
People haven’t gotten less fertile. They’ve got less inclined to have kids. Yes, the financial cost of it is part of it. But the flip side of “living your life vicariously through your kids”, is that you have little life of your own, their needs take over. It’s hard work, another job on top of the job you do to pay for everything.
This is a massive problem for all the reasons stated in this article. It will destroy the welfare state. We’re going to have a situation where a huge section of the population will be childless, sick and old with no money to pay for their own care.
It’s going to get incredibly bleak. I don’t think it’s fixable by policy tweaks
Criminalise abortion, incentivise marriage, make divorce almost impossible.
> “As fertility rate hits all-time low in England and Wales, …”
Entice more Irish, Scots and Commonwealth peoples.
I was sitting on the train back from my holiday a few days ago, a toddler a few rows forward was screaming his head off and throwing his shoes and other belongings across the carriage.
It made me wonder, why would anyone inflict this upon themselves whilst working full time? The loss of freedom, hobbies and time for oneself… All for THAT?!
It’s a no brainier that flexible working would help parents work and pay for raising kids and keeping older people in work longer (needed for an ageing population) and give people time outside work they enjoy that’s good for their mental health, get fit and healthier so they can raise kids and age healthier (needed to work longer and ease burden on the NHS). But nah, the investment companies that own office real estate want people back in the office so that’s what’s happening. Madness.
Funny enough most of discussions regarding fertility and number of children disregards biology and whats drives this.
The increase in world population the last 100 years was not driven by us giving birth to more children, but those children surviving and living long enough to repeat the process.
That drive is gone. in wealthy countries the child is more or less guaranteed to live long enough. Why try for more?
We naturally settle at a lower number.
Almost the opposite of other animals, but their strategy is almost always; Have the most number of children that you can feed. In years when there is a food shortage the starting litters are smaller.
Secondly we do not directly depend on then to live a good life. So we can even skip children all together. We do not need the workforce on our local farm and our old age seems secure.
The fact that our pyramide scheme like economic system depends on increasing birthrates, is too abstract for us to feel directly.
There no way for a government to get people who don’t have kids to have kids they wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s such a big life change that anything affordable wouldn’t work.
What they need to do is try to culturally normalise 3 kids as the standard so those who do have kids have the extra one to make up for those who dont. Change the 2 kids restriction in benefits to 3, give every person the right to 3 fully paid mat leaves (men and women), give extra child benefits for the first 3 children etc, plus also do things to make having children easier more generally – subsidise child care more, change school holiday times so they are fully staggered year round with holiday clubs offered as standard so people don’t need to pay ridiculous premiums for school holidays etc
Likely more controversially, given part of the problem is people delaying families so no time for the extra, plus more difficulty concieving, additional benefits could also be used to incentivise people who do want kids to have the first kid before 35 and get started rather than delay – longer, better paid maternity leave for the under 35s for example.
No fixes are going to happen, the government doesn’t care, why fix fertility rates when it takes 20 odd years for a human to become economically beneficial to the gov. They’re just going to keep immigration up so the country won’t collapse, who cares what the country looks like in 40 years, as long as the gdp line goes up and the politicians get rich that’s all that matters.
Make life bearable enough so people will naturally have kids on their own?
1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink) fix overpopulation and people will start having more children. Bear in mind that birth rates have been below replacement rate since the 1970s so any increase in population is completely artificial and stoppable at any time if our government actually cared. Equally, nobody wants to bring children into a sprawlling grey-hellscape (just look at Japan’s inner cities) so building more housing is not the answer.
2. Lower the retirement age for two benefits:
* Most people don’t see an end in sight to the pension age rises right now. I fully expect that it will probably be pulled from under me if I get to pensionable age. I would not want to bring someone I created, someone who I loved more than life itself, into a world where I knew they would be working until they dropped dead – with not an ounce of peace amongst it (save for maybe the odd burnout or breakdown).
* Childcare is expensive. The majority of free childcare is provided by grandparents. Whilst it is only a hypothesis, the [Grandmother hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis#) and the existence of menopause in our species long before death does kind of lean into the idea that we are supposed to divert resources (like time) into our progeny’s descendants, which is something you can’t do if you’re working until you’re dead.
3. So who is raising the kids? Well if you’re not fortunate enough to have been born into a large family that can take childrearing in turns, you’ll be shelling out for paid childcare. Then a nursery, then you leave them to the mercy of the school system. I remember reading an article in the Independent Newspaper well over a decade ago now that said the average time a family spends together per day is under 50 minutes. I can’t imagine, with the world seeming to get faster, that this has got any better now. What’s the point of having children you never get to see?
4. And why do you never get to see them? It’s because work has consumed everything. Commutes are longer if you work on-site. If you work from home, then it bleeds into your personal life – quite literally it is in your personal space. I worked it out recently, out of a 168 hour week, I actually only have 20.5 hours. That’s when the essentials are taken out (like cooking, working, commuting, sleeping, etc). That means my whole year is only really 44.5 days long. Why did we ever agree to this as a society? Between the day I turned 20 and the day of my supposed retirement (68), I will have breathed for 48 years but only *lived* for just shy of six years and a whole family has to fit into that – finding a mate and raising kid(s).
5. But what should one do with their six years of living if you don’t want kids? Well there’s not actually that much to do. Most courses or interesting events happen while you’re working, or they’re for specific groups that you don’t fit into (like non-workers, or craft events for teens). Where are the communities? The feast days? The en masse trip to the beach decided last-minute on a Saturday morning? They don’t happen anymore, or at least, not like they used to. Everyone is trying to claw back their energy from a week of working instead.
6. Why is everyone working so much? Greed. Companies refusing to rehire positions and creating skeleton-crews which forces those left to work harder or be replaced by an ever-growing pool of people available and desperate enough to take your position. Your job isn’t safe. The roof over your head isn’t safe. The food on your plate is not safe.
7. Speaking of safety, pretty much all mammals refuse to breed if they know conditions are not safe. It takes a lot of energy and resources to rip a woman’s cells apart to create and then deliver a child – resources that could be used at a later (safer) date. I don’t know about you, but have you smelled the air lately? It feels like we’re on the edge of something. Civil unrest? Economic depression? Political upheaval? I’m not quite sure, but I’m not the only one who feels it.
It’s multifactoral, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at at least one or two of these areas as a civilisation.
Looking at this the other way around, declining fertility is only an issue to prop up and look after an ageing population as well as supplying the economic labour. Flip the problem on its head and don’t try and solve fertility is much easier.
We need a huge investment in getting our robotics and AI industry off the ground so we are world leaders in automation. Raising productivity, removing the need for so many low paying jobs and filling the gaps that require immigration solves two problems as well as supporting us internationally.
There are only two possible futures currently; Automate away a huge number of low level jobs or accept we need immigration to fill them.
Correctly taxing the increased non human production and exports of the new technology fill the government revenue gap.
However this requires coordinated vision and commitment to the future over a multi decade timescale and multi billions of investment so zero chance of happening.
Is sad tbh I have not ideas why British people want their country to end. I once saw a Guardian article where they were encouraging people to not have kids for the environment funny enough they only used pictures of white babies for this promotion for obvious reasons.
Anyway I’m a migrant and I will say this to British people this is only place you can call home this policy of simply thinking you can use immigration and think the only outcome is GDP is a joke. Replacing your population with immigration will change the social dynamic of your country. You run the risk of replacing your entire heritage and culture history. I don’t say this lightly but you lot can loose everything
Nothing to do with money. Poor families have had more kids than rich ones since forever.
Women want careers, travel and fun – not nappies.
stop trying to squeeze every single ounce of productivity out of people and allow them some time and resources to be able to be parents. This is the fault of the endless relentless push for the profit line to go up.
Nothing, there is no solution. Wait for them to bounce back at some point. Every country from China and Saudi Arabia to Finland and Canada is experiencing it, it is a global phenomenon.
We still need to make parenting easier and less financially taxing, but mainly because it is the right thing to do, not because it is going to solve the problem (it didn’t in countries that tried it).
Ultimately where I agree with rightoid chuds is that the main reason of that is women’s freedom. When given a choice, a lot of people really prefer.not to have kids! But I think freedom of choice is more important, and limiting that freedom is worse than having lower TFR.
Ultimately the numbers themselves don’t matter, lots of countries have doubled in population over the second half of XX century, and we’re fine being sustained by half as many people with far less automation. The problem is the transition period with abnormal numbers of pensioners in the society who also have high expectations about their quality of life. That is already fucking up a lot of democracies including the UK (non-democracies just ignore the oldies).
Start giving working families tax breaks to have more children and stop making the UK a third world country by importing it.
Fuck it. We’ve had our time. Let the dolphins take over.
We could rebalance our society to make it so that the average person can live a fulfilling life on a single full time job.
They might be more inclined to want to create more life. In a society then can be confident that their child would be able to live a happy life in.
We are about to enter an age that super scales the productivity’s of our society that will make the Industrial Revolution look like a small change but this time we people are not the main driver of that change. We need far less people in the world. The country’s that soon adopt population shrinkage will be far better off and when the population shrinks that much the birth rate will stabilise back out.
do second generation migrants and beyond have the same reduced amount of kids as couples born in the UK now?
We could always go for quality over quantity?
Most people take out far more than they pay in over their lifetimes, so we’re basically living in a giant pyramid scheme where we constantly need MORE PEOPLE to fund current retirees, but all this does is kick the can down the road.
Start by introducing a mandatory £10,000 few for living in Britain. Paid by everyone over 18 not in full time education. No excuses, no exceptions.
I think it’s just we don’t need as many people so it’s decreasing but maybe it’ll get to a more stable level once population is lower
* couple in a relationship need both in full time work, to afford the house and bills and to live a somewhat comfortable way of life
* having a child needs a partner off work for 12 months and then someone to be 75/80% working for the next 4 years till school kicks in.
The numbers just don’t add up. It’s all housing and utilities which was just drain our finances. If you have two kids you have to half someone’s salary for two years and have them at 80% for the next 5/6 years.
* basically people need dual incomes for the household to survive, yet also need someone not working to look after the child. It’s a catch 22
“Think about when we can start work and finish work” I expect the billionaires will try and make this 14 till death …
Money and solving the many and varied existential crises.
Fertility issues have become a big thing. I read 1 in 4 babies now born are convinced with medical help. Thats just a ridiculous amount. Weve normalised diets and lifestyle practice that are not good for us or our fertility. We rub chemicals on our skin and clean with them when they are known to lower your fertility. Polyester in nappies and underwear. Long term effects of hormonal birth control. High stress lifestyles where a women cannot rest and feel safe had direct impacts on their ability to conceive. All people see nowadays is apathetic parenting which leads to shitty kids and you assume all kids will be like that. Its not the most socially accepted thing to say at a young age you want a bunch of kids and husband. People wait longer to have kids, or even just to find a partner or get married which naturally means less time to have kids in. Birth has become this thing that is used to scare women rather than being seen as a right of passage in a womens life and something to be celebrated and make her feel empowerment, like how mothering should make her feel empowered. We dont live in community we live individual lives and (this is coming from the biggest introvert) having a baby is hard and you need people around you. You need other women to do your laundry, to help with shopping, to get you out the house being the biggest one at least for me. Even just for them to come and offer stimulating time for the baby while you have a cup of tea because youve gotten up, showered, ate, dressed, said bye to husband and baby has been breastfeeding the whole time, you need a second to just catch your breath. We dont have that unless you can pay for the help. We also know enough about attachment parenting and positive attachment that we know that paying for the help rather than it being a blood family memeber is detrimental to the child and we dont want to put babies in nursery while you work all day and harm the attachment or have enought time to maintain positve attachment even as a sahm because you have to do a million things. Kids are meant to be raised in communities not by one or two people
Fertility rates decline when women have more control over their lives. And whatever the “optimum” world population I have little doubt it’s lower than it is now. But we have a transitional problem in the shortage of people to look out for us in our old age. I think the answer is to pour money into gerontology, so old people don’t need as much looking after.
I’m not convinced it’s down to economics, sure many people are putting of having kids until they’re financially secure, people with no financial security have been having kids for thousands of years, as have positively poor people.
Stress is a bigger factor, we’ve been listening to experts since the 60 telling us that x year certain environmental catastrophes will occur science and history have sort of backed up the predictions but as time has marched on the “sort of” element has be replaced my more accurate information, so now we have a fairly clear idea of what to expect in the distant future and up until ten years ago it was feasible that that distant future was “more my kids lifetime away” unfortunately time wasn’t marching, time has been positively running and what was many decades away is at best only a few, because right now we can see it happening.
What we’re doing now is what we should have been doing 50 years ago, it looks like it’s too late now and that much is obvious to all but the deliberately blind. A decade or two ago it looked like we as individuals could make a difference by doing our little bit, but now it’s obvious that no matter how much we do our immediate neighbours will undo it with their range rover, maybe we could bully the self entitled and ignorant into thinking about the future and their childrens future, but they will point ever upwards as we have at them but they’ll be pointing at the big corporations, funded and encouraged by our government, who in turn blame us for not being able to afford an electric car, solar panels and air sourced heat pumps, but rather than fix that they’ve focused their energies on plastic carrier bags, drinking straws and bottle caps. Certain aspects of life were infinitely more environmentally friendly up until the 70s than they’ll ever be again because there’s more profits to be made by literally fucking the planet in the arse than there is in making the slightest effort.
Fear, absolute fear of the consequences of our actions is why people are not having children.
Excuse me but where are all the schools, hospitals, family homes, GPs surgeries, nurseries and maternity services required to actually provide for all these children were supposed to be having? Can you *imagine* the chaos that would be caused if every woman of childbearing age decided to have 3 children all of a sudden? Have any of these politicians and economists tried to get their toddler into a local nursery recently? Or get an NHS dentist appointment?
We need to accept that our welfare system is completely unsustainable, it always was and it always will be. It was an overly generous and philanthropic thought experiment dreamed up in the 20th century with no thought for sustainability for future generations. There will be no state retirement or UC in our near future.
The population was never going to endlessly grow without limit and surely it’s pretty natural for it to speed up and slow down and go backwards some times?
Why is it such a big deal? Governments should plan for it.
Our basic needs as humans are not being met. The fact that, as a society, we’ve prioritised profit & shareholder returns over everything means we have no job security, no welfare, no housing security, expensive rents and ever-skyrocketing bills.
Until people can afford their own, reliable housing, they won’t have kids. If their income is fragile, they won’t have kids. Boomers keep bleating “don’t have kids you can’t afford” and that’s what’s happened.
Unfortunately capitalism thrives best when workers are scared of unemployment, leading to decades of wage suppression and high immigration. So, why would I have a child when he’ll never have anywhere to live or a safe job?
The obvious/easy answer, for developed countries like the UK is increasing immigration. If you need more people in your country they can either be born there or immigrate. That is decidedly not a popular idea right now though.