The Lower Red Lion, a 17th-century pub in St Albans, Hertfordshire, is an unassuming establishment. According to its own website, it has no history of “noteworthy guests” – “the height of the yard arch would not accommodate a full coach”, it explains. In 2024, however, it gained a degree of notoriety when a new patron announced his arrival on social media. “Found my new local,” he wrote, pointing in the attached photo to the pub’s sign: “Dog friendly; child-free.” Having, perhaps unwittingly, ignited the embers of a long-running debate about the place of children in public spaces, he found himself in receipt of thousands of replies.
It’s tempting when reading such interactions to draw far-reaching conclusions. Are they symptomatic of a wider anti-natal culture? As a parent of two under-fives, I find the online conversation sometimes plays in my mind when in public spaces. Reading a picture book aloud on the bus recently prompted a passenger to make for the upper deck. Not a Meg and Mog fan, perhaps.
Historians with cooler heads might point to other phenomena to explain the pub debate, from shifting expectations of motherhood to the decline in freedom afforded to younger children (now unlikely to be allowed to roam unsupervised while their parents enjoy a pint). They might also point to a degree of continuity. One contributor to this particular debate concerned that parents “let kids run wild nowadays and don’t teach them to behave properly” can be assured that their concerns would have been met by sympathetic nods through the centuries. Among the parenting tactics bemoaned by one medieval critic (cited in Hugh Cunningham’s magnificent history The Invention of Childhood) was the tendency to “dandill hymn and dindill hymn and pamper hymm… and gyve hym the swetyst stop in the dish evyn when he lest deserve it”.
What has undeniably changed, however, is the number of children we are having in the first place. In October, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported the fertility rate in England and Wales had fallen to its lowest level on record, at 1.44 children per woman. It hasn’t reached replacement level (2.1 children on average) since 1972. Globally, the number of children per woman has more than halved since 1963, from 5.3 to 2.3. The belief that we have entered a “fertility crisis” is widespread.
Political interventions have proved contentious given the personal nature of family planning. The numbers have proved vulnerable to speculation and projection. There is a tendency to blame flattened dramatis personae (typically “the career woman who runs out of time”) rather than interrogate the many undercurrents at play. Some spy an opportunity to inflame existing political divides – witness the denunciation of “childless cat ladies” by the new vice-president, JD Vance. Pope Francis recently repeated his concern that people now prefer to have “a cat or a little dog instead of a child”, apparently impervious to the reaction his similar remarks produced in 2022.
The Office for National Statistics has been careful to accompany its numbers with context about how fertility rates are calculated. With women now having their first child at an older age, we don’t yet know how many children millennials and younger generations will end up having. The rate is shaped by how many women of child-bearing age are in the population at any one time. Going forward, the ONS says, the fertility rate will continue to be influenced by the structure of the population, and the number and timing of births.
For those concerned that society has taken an anti-child turn, polling suggests that only a minority of young adults are definite about not wanting to have children. Of the 7,000 32-year-olds surveyed for University College London’s “Next Steps” study, which follows the lives of people born in England in 1989-90, just 12 per cent of the 46 per cent who did not already have children placed themselves into this camp. Half were definite that they did want children.
Commentary on the falling fertility rate often cites the socio-economic factors that might stand between the population’s “fertility aspirations” and the number of children people end up having. The UCL study found that just one in four of those who wanted more children said they were currently trying. The researchers pointed to “higher inflation, the rising cost of living and housing prices” as sources of financial strain. Last year, the New Social Covenant Unit (NSCU), set up by Conservative MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, interpreted its own polling of women aged 18 to 35 as evidence that “economic concerns stand in the way”. Asked “What, if anything, do you feel would need to happen for you to decide to try to have a child, either now or in the future?”, respondents who were uncertain selected affordable childcare, housing and greater economic security as key factors.
A close look at polling, however, points to a more complex situation, perhaps less amenable to simple policy solutions. For respondents to the NSCU poll, a desire to “see more of the world” was as popular a reason not to have children as the lack of affordable childcare. And among the 26 per cent who (either definitely or probably) did not want to have children, the statements that they felt most accurately described their decision included: “It would affect my lifestyle too much”; “Motherhood is a deeply unappealing prospect”; and “I do not particularly like children”. By far the most popular reason given to the UCL researchers by those not trying to have children was “I do not feel ready”. The falling birth rate reflects much more than the country’s finances. It raises questions about the purpose and value of human life.
State-level anxiety about the fertility rate, and attempts to engineer its revival, are nothing new. In the first century AD, the Roman emperor Augustus offered women who had three or more children the incentive of freedom from guardianship by a male relative. In Bread for All, which tells the story of the origins of the welfare state, Chris Renwick describes how in the first half of the 20th century, British people were “fascinated by questions about fertility”, amid warnings that the population could fall to five million within a century. In a 1945 report about Britain’s birth rate, the research project Mass Observation warned, based on interviews with more than a thousand people, that many lacked “faith in the future”.
But what might surprise earlier generations is the notion that having children could be regarded as simply one option among many.
In their 2024 book What Are Children For?, Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, dissatisfied with the “shallowness” of the conversation about “Millennial ambivalence”, set out to help readers grapple with the “deep philosophical stakes of the question”. Drawing on centuries of thought from Sophocles to Adrienne Rich, via Schopenhauer and Elena Ferrante, they ask: “What do material concerns – about money, career and the desire for autonomy and flexibility – reveal about our priorities and what ‘happiness’ has come to mean to us?” The decision whether or not to have a child is “as personally consequential as it is philosophically profound”, they suggest.
The book concludes with an essay by Berg, who has a toddler of her own, Lila. Speaking on a video call from the West Coast of the US, where she teaches philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, Berg suggested that, when it comes to how we approach the question of whether or not to have children, the “deep” shift at work is the application of an “opportunity cost” framework. “Once you ask, ‘What are the advantages of having kids and what is it going to cost me?’ then… it is always a sacrifice,” she said. “I often say it’s surprising people are still having them.”
Berg challenged the extent to which having children has come to be seen in the West as “the end of life as you know it” – something to be held off until you have achieved every other ambition. Her co-author, Wiseman, writes about regarding parenthood as “inimical to my experience”, worrying that, if she became a mother, “everything that I enjoyed or that made me a halfway interesting person would recede beyond my reach”. She is left asking the question: “How do you figure out how to throw yourself off a cliff?”
For her part, Berg pushes back against the narrative that motherhood is inevitably transformative. She did not, she reflects, become a better person after giving birth; the love that she feels for her child isn’t like nothing else she has ever known, but “simple and familiar”. In her final chapter (“Hello from the other side”), Berg is honest about the challenges of parenthood, while acknowledging that these can be “excruciatingly dull” to hear recounted. It’s a testimony intended to reassure those suffering from Wiseman’s clifftop vertigo that parenthood need not mean the loss of “our myriad other identities”.
In our conversation, she recalled a young male student at a Midwestern university who told her that he had always wanted to have children; his parents had always, he said, talked to him about how to raise them. “For him, having children doesn’t feel like a completely unfamiliar, mysterious, horrifying experience,” Berg said. “If I have a big ambition for the book, it’s, ‘Can we restore a sense of much more continuity within people’s lives, across people’s lives, of life with children?’”
Berg’s comments reminded me of an essay by Nadya Williams, whose book Mothers, Children and the Body Politic challenges the theory that when it comes to creativity children are simply a drain on the energy that a parent could have been devoting to art – a theory famously propagated by the English literary critic Cyril Connolly (“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”). In “Writing at Burger King”, an essay for Plough magazine, Williams described “writing about Augustine while keeping an eye on the kids happily climbing inside the tubular structure suspended several feet above the ground”. It’s an illustration of the possibility of a continuum envisaged by Berg – of one’s passions, interests and personality surviving, not being sublimated by, parenthood.
The solution to the falling birth rate proffered by legislators and commentators is often economic: family-friendly policies such as free universal childcare and generous parental leave that make having a child more affordable. But the fertility rate is falling in countries where such benefits and incentives are already in place. In Sweden, for instance, where childcare costs are capped at a maximum of three per cent of the household’s gross income and parents are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave, the rate stands at 1.52. In Finland, which also caps childcare costs at a fraction of the UK average and offers almost a year of paid parental leave, the fertility rate stood at 1.32 in 2022, down by almost a third since 2010. Of those aged 35, half are childless, and that proportion is increasing.
Anna Rotkirch, director of Finland’s Population Research Institute, has described this trend as not primarily to do with policy, but “something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive”. “It’s OK to say, ‘I don’t like children,’ and it’s the only demographic you can ever say that about,” she has said. Since the 1990s, the institute has conducted yearly surveys that explore, among other things, respondents’ ideal number of children, the reasons they might not have this number and if they don’t want children at all, why not. Many of those who have one child go on to have a second, third, or even fourth, and their survey responses indicate that, without Finland’s family-friendly policies, this might not be the case. But driving the decline in the fertility rate is the number of people deciding not to have a first child at all. For this group, the most common explanation is that they have “other interesting things to do in life”. That sentiment will not be changed by an extra month of paternity leave, Rotkirch observed.
She cited the “dating crisis” as one contributing factor. Most Finns in their twenties do want children, the institute’s research suggests. For those in their twenties and thirties who are childless but want to have a child, the most common reason given is the lack of a suitable partner. In Finland the number of “first cohabitations” leading to children is in decline, and the fertility rates of women in their twenties have almost halved in the past 15 years.
What has changed? Berg and Wiseman diagnose the decoupling of the search for love from the desire to have children. An idea has taken hold, they suggest, that “to date authentically – naturally, organically, traditionally – one must suppress the desire to have kids”. Seeking a partner now entails a net cast wide in pursuit of romantic compatibility. Women in particular fear that acknowledging their desire for children or fears about running out of time could taint this search or result in compromise. Approaching dating with a view to finding a person to have children with is seen as contrived or calculated, anathema to romance.
When in public places with my own children, who are two and four, I think of the online “children in pubs” discourse, and wonder whether possibly entirely innocent glances might have a hostile edge. But might changing attitudes towards children in public spaces be caused by awkwardness or unfamiliarity, rather than rancour?
Rotkirch tells me about the “low-fertility trap”. Studies have shown that living in neighbourhoods where more third children are born means that you are more likely to have a third child. If your siblings or colleagues, or even the siblings of your colleagues, have a child, you are more likely to have one. There is, she said, “a very clear social contagion effect”. It goes both ways. The “natural cues” provided by seeing people with children, which send the message “this is a good society to have children in”, are “withering away”. She cites “I Think About It All the Time”, in which the British singer Charli XCX describes visiting a friend in Stockholm and meeting her baby for the first time. Charli returns home wondering about starting to try to have her own child: “How sublime/What a joy, oh my, oh my/Standing there/Same old clothes she wore before, holding her child, yeah/She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father/And now they both know these things that I don’t.”
Rotkirch, who is in her late fifties and a mother herself, speaks of a “deeper cultural shift” towards speaking of motherhood as a sacrifice, with women asking: “Why would I sacrifice my body or my partnership or my easy life?” She adds: “I just know that, for myself and my women friends, that is not how we would have described it. We were asking ‘Is this a good time? Is this a good man?’ It was more like, ‘It’s an adventure, it’s another dimension.’ We would never have coded it as a sacrifice, and I think that’s very interesting.”
In 2019 Deloitte published the results of a global survey of 13,416 Millennials across 42 countries. Asked about their life ambitions, having children ranked behind travelling the world, earning high salaries, buying a home, and making a “positive impact”. Inevitably, the headlines made sweeping generalisations about a generation’s values. But perhaps it’s the framing of the question that is a more telling illustration of how society has changed – in its invitation to rank having children alongside other ambitions.
Reflecting on life with Lila in the final chapter of What Are Children For?, Berg writes that: “To have children is to allow yourself to stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefits it confers or the price it exacts.” In conversations with people who ask for good reasons to have children, she tells them: “Your experience and your life with your child will exceed whatever reason you come up with… There is a lot more than whatever it is you are seeking to get from it. It’s a human being that’s at stake.”
The difficulty here, of course, is the impossibility of knowing what life will be like if – to use Wiseman’s cliff analogy – you take the leap.
During our interview, conducted while my toddler was entertained by Mr Tumble, unwilling to go to sleep, we discussed how fraught the conversation around children – having them, sharing a space with them – has become, not only in public forums, but in private, too. It’s unavoidably personal. I realise that part of what bothers me about the statement “I don’t like children” is its lack of specificity. Perhaps the children you see in pubs are loud. But children are many things. They are shy toddlers, six-year-olds with encyclopaedic knowledge of sea creatures, pre-teens sneaking peeks at the 20-somethings at the bar and wondering what it might be like to be so cool, so assured.
I have a few of my own examples of run-ins with people less than happy to be sharing a space with children. But the encounter that stands out comes from 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when my eldest son was a few months old. I was sitting by the pram on the high street feeling exhausted and distracted by worries. A young guy passing peeked under the hood. “Little man’s doing fine,” he said encouragingly, before strolling off.
[See also: The myth of the liberal international order]
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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors