Earlier this month, I spent a full-on weekend with my three-year-old goddaughter Hettie, culminating on Sunday morning with ‘messy church’ – a two-hour-long toddler-filled extravaganza of arts, crafts and puppet shows based on Bible stories.
By the time I was due to leave for London, I was frankly wiped out.
As I said my goodbyes, however, looking forward to the quiet train journey ahead, Hettie squawked ‘Cuddle!’ and clambered into my arms. As her little body nestled warm and soft against my hip, I forgot my exhaustion and felt myself melt. I gave her a squeeze and a kiss and the thought swam into my mind: what if I had one of these?
I’m 36, single, and staring down the likelihood that I will not have children of my own.
Although I have these broody pangs – when I hold Hettie, see my nephew’s face light up with a toothy beam or my niece waggle her arms in excitement – I have pretty much accepted that, unless there’s an astonishing change in circumstances, I am not going to be a mother.
I am far from alone in this.
Yesterday we learned that the birth rate in England and Wales has fallen to the lowest level since records began nearly 90 years ago. The total fertility rate last year dropped to 1.44 children per woman – far below the 2.1 rate believed necessary to sustain a stable population without inward migration.
This isn’t just a UK issue. Around the world, birth rates are plummeting. Italy, renowned for its family-orientated culture, currently has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Rates in the US and Asia have also dropped to record-breaking lows.
And these declining birth rates spell trouble for society in the decades ahead. Fewer babies mean a shrinking workforce, fewer workers to support a growing elderly population and putting untold pressure on public finances and economic growth.
As Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, said yesterday, the trend should certainly ‘worry anyone thinking about what Britain will look like in 2050’.
Billionaire Elon Musk has even posited – more than once – that the collapse in birth rates poses a greater risk to civilisation than global warming.
So why are millennial women like me not having kids?
In my case, I had always assumed that one day I would have children – in the same unthinking way that I assumed I’d make the same money as my parents.
I didn’t give any serious thought to the actual question of whether I should have kids until a couple of years ago.
Why so late? I can only plead distraction. I’ve been mostly single all my life and certainly I’ve not been in a relationship where children were on the agenda.
I moved to New York when I was 30 where the focus was firmly on work and fun.
Babies just didn’t factor into it. I flew home when my nephew was born, marvelled at his tiny toes, then promptly forgot about the bundle of joy apart from the WhatsApp updates I received across the Atlantic. I was too busy, too absorbed in the life I was building for myself.
It was when I returned to the UK at 33 and saw friends actually becoming mothers that it dawned on me I was now at the stage where ‘family life’ began. Somehow I had still been in the mindset that someone telling you they were pregnant didn’t automatically mean congratulations were in order.
There’s no doubt my generation takes far longer to reach the milestones of adulthood than previous generations.
Many of us graduated, loaded with student debt, when the 2008 financial crisis hit – or suffered its aftermath. We are now struggling through a cost-of-living crisis where once strong industries are laying off swathes of their workforce. Crippling rents have turned home ownership into a distant dream. In expensive cities, many of us are still living in house shares in our 30s and beyond.
Is it all that surprising that a significant proportion of us are putting off babies and, perhaps, giving up on them altogether?
Then there are the warnings from the harried mothers among us. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who have complained to me that the staggering cost of childcare swallows up most of their monthly pay packet.
We childless Millennials look at nursery fees costing thousands of pounds a month with bafflement. How could we possibly ever afford it, and would that therefore mean having to give up work?
A related issue: ‘mum guilt’. Stressed and exhausted friends with babies tell me they feel they are failing on all fronts, neither a perfect mother nor a perfect employee. ‘Work like you’re not a mother, mother like you don’t work,’ they are told, but how on earth can they?
There are other reasons to explain why my generation aren’t having babies, including worries about climate change and bringing children into an already over-burdened world (this isn’t one of my fears but one friend has given this as the primary reason for her indecision about having a baby); a lack of optimism in the future; and rising levels of education and employment among women, which historically leads to fewer babies. But there’s one thing missing from the debate. It’s not just women who are responsible for falling birth rates. Men also play a role.
And, believe me, it’s not as though there are hordes of men out there desperate to become fathers but unable to find a woman willing to make it happen.
Just as women are opting out of motherhood, men are opting out of fatherhood. And modern dating has undeniably contributed to the collapse in the birth rate.
Dating apps have encouraged us to be ever more casual in our pursuit of love, to replace it with far less binding lust. Serious relationships seem harder than ever to come by.
I find dating so fraught with disappointment and time-consuming admin that I rarely do it. This approach is unlikely to lead to a partner and, later, a baby.
Plenty of women I know would be open to motherhood but, now in their late 30s, have not met a suitable partner. Many are weighing up their options in this regard. Five friends have frozen their eggs and one acquaintance has had a baby with the help of Viking sperm courtesy of a clinic in Denmark.
I’ve never seriously considered going through any of that.
While I’m relieved there are options for women who feel called to become mothers but have no man on the scene, the prospect of raising a child alone makes me want to lock myself in a bathroom and curl up in the foetal position.
I cannot imagine the superhuman organisation, strength, support and funds required to do motherhood solo, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have them.
I’d rather leave it up to fate, chance, a higher power, whatever you’d like to call it.
For I hope I will fall in love and have a baby. But if that person doesn’t come along or doesn’t arrive in time or the stars don’t quite align, I can accept life without a child.
That acceptance isn’t without sorrow. I have heard women tell of the joy motherhood brings, that it’s the best thing they ever did, that any work accomplishments or travel adventures pale in comparison to raising a child.
It makes me sad I may never look at my own child and feel a surge of all-encompassing love.
But I tell myself there are plenty of compensations: more money, more freedom, less worry, the opportunity to travel, to focus on work and hobbies, invest in friendships and relationships.
It looks like more and more Millennials are telling themselves the same thing.
