Over the last 12 months it has become imperative that I start my journey to motherhood. Just ask my Instagram algorithm, which now serves me a steady stream of “birth story” content. Or my Vinted page, which seems to think I should be browsing second-hand baby carriers. That’s not to mention the targeted ads for egg-freezing clinics which have quietly replaced early-bird offers on spa breaks. This is, apparently, the new normal for women in their late twenties. But now we have someone new to blame for the state of our biological clocks: “immature men”.
In the UK, the birth rate has fallen to 1.44 children per woman, according to the ONS the lowest ever recorded in England and Wales. For years, the explanation was straightforward: women were waiting too long, prioritising careers, or – as the Vice President of the United States would say – becoming “childless cat ladies”. But now, a new report has flipped the narrative.
According to research from the Centre for Social Justice, three million women aged 16 to 45 are predicted to become “missing mothers”. It certainly sounds like an upgrade on childless cat ladies. What’s more, their male counterparts have been recast from carefree bachelors to “immature men”. The shift offers a certain, if fleeting, relief. For once, the problem is not women’s ambition or misplaced priorities, but men’s reluctance to grow up.
Many women will recognise some version of this. Do my male peers expect to spend their twenties young, wild and unencumbered, only to settle down at 32 and produce a small dynasty on demand? Possibly. But my female peers are hardly queuing up for motherhood either. No one is ringing a bell at the proverbial baby market wearing a sandwich board that reads: “Ready for a baby. Mature applicants only.”
What exists instead is something less dramatic but more telling: a shared delay. A sense that the conditions required to start a family remain just out of reach. If there is a crisis of maturity, it is not confined to one gender.
Still, the panicked attempts to hurry us all up and combat the “demographic timebomb” are spreading across Europe and beyond, with pronatalism making a resounding surge as a key political issue. In France, Emmanuel Macron has called for “demographic rearmament”; in the United States, Donald Trump has floated the idea of baby bonuses; in the UK, parties including Reform UK have proposed tax incentives for parents. Parenthood is increasingly being treated less as a private decision than a matter of national policy. When Miriam Cates, a senior fellow at the CSJ, suggests that large numbers of women “missing out” on motherhood will have social and economic consequences, it reveals how quickly questions of personal fulfilment become questions of state interest. It also conveys a simple warning: opting out carries measurable costs.
The figure of the childless woman has long been used as a cautionary tale, a warning of what happens when femininity is not fulfilled in the “proper” way. Literature is full of such characters: the cold, obsessive Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, Dickens’ jilted and decaying Miss Havisham. Even the more modern, ostensibly comic anxieties of Bridget Jones hinge on the same fear: being sat next to a “Jeremy” at dinner, being told “you really ought to hurry up and get sprogged up you know, old girl.” The language may have evolved, but the underlying anxiety remains. These figures share a common function: to embody the consequences of getting it wrong.
Much like Betty Friedan’s observations on “the problem that has no name”, the silent pressures of social expectations persist. The language of obligation has somewhat diminished, replaced by the language of choice. Yet the expectation itself is still there. Motherhood is no longer framed as a duty, but as an inevitable horizon. Something to be anticipated, managed and, if necessary, deferred at one’s own risk. It’s the same rinsed and repeated issue that feminists have been pushing back on for generations.
But in 2026, the pressure to have children sits uneasily alongside the economic realities of early adulthood. It is difficult to present motherhood as an obvious next step when many people are still struggling to secure stable housing, pay off student debt or even establish a modicum of financial independence. From hoping our parents won’t notice they still fund our phone contracts, to stealthily staying logged in to the family Netflix account, we have all stayed children far longer than previous generations.
Online, this has been reframed with a degree of irony: “I’m just a 27-year-old teenager,” is plastered across reels depicting young people stuffing their suitcases with the contents of their parents’ pantries before heading back to their own homes. The real immaturity lies not with men and women, but with a politics that refuses to confront the cost of growing up.
It is perhaps easier to attribute falling birth rates to individual failings – to immature men or overly ambitious women – than to confront the structural conditions shaping people’s lives. Herein lies the issue with demanding parenthood of this generation. In London, the average cost of nursery care is around £450 per week, while paternity leave in many workplaces still rarely stretches beyond two weeks.
For us women in our late twenties, the result is a strange double message. On the one hand, there is a steady pressure – from algorithms, politicians and cultural narratives – warning us to have children before it is too late. On the other, there is the material reality of an economy that makes doing so increasingly precarious.
Before having children, a woman still needs money and a room of her own – as well as a mature man.
[Further reading: AI teddy bears should not give bondage advice]
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