There is something I've come to notice recently, as I walk along my east London street of Victorian terraced houses on my way to take my son to his £1,900-a-month nursery, wondering which Hackney primary school he'll go to, since another four closed down this past September. It seems that everyone over 60 owns a whole house while those with young families are crammed into half a one each, the pretty brick homes chopped up and reconfigured into split-level flats and sold to 30- and 40-somethings as a more "affordable" option (even though we paid at least 10 times more for them than our boomer neighbours did for their homes).
When I was a teenager, I had imagined a household filled with children in my future. As one of three siblings - and with each of my parents being one of three - it seemed inevitable that I would continue the cycle by unleashing my own trio on the world. That hasn't happened: at 42, I find myself with a three-year-old son and no plans to have any more.
If my parents having three kids was typically boomer, then having one is surely the millennial flex. Sign me up for parenthood, hold the chaos. My fellow "one and done" friends - of which there are many - and I often chat about our choice quite smugly. That is until we realise that we can't actually afford to have any more children anyway.
There are more and more of us having fewer and fewer babies, if any at all. And it's having very real consequences: in August, it was announced that the fertility rate for England and Wales had fallen for the third year in a row to 1.41 children per woman, a record low. The average age of mothers at childbirth has also risen to 30.9 years, up from 29 two decades ago. For those born in 2025, it is predicted to be 36. It's a trend we're seeing around the globe: the United States's fertility rate has fallen to 1.62, in Spain it is 1.12 and the lowest in the world is currently South Korea's at 0.72, all considerably lower than the replacement rate of 2.7 children per woman needed by countries for their population to remain stable. In June, Natalia Kanem, former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, announced, "The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates."
The reasons are myriad, "but key is a change in the labour market", says professor Jane Falkingham, director of the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton. "We've moved from having what social scientists call the male-breadwinner model to having a dual-earner model. If women are working then they have to think very carefully about when they're having their children and many women have decided to postpone having their children from their 20s into their 30s. They will then likely have fewer children and may even encounter problems having as many as they would like."