A wave of childlessness is sweeping the whole world

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1:20The New Statesman.

1:27Hey Camilla, it's Olly Doug Moore at The New Statesman. I'm really excited to interview you today. I personally take a bit of interest in the birth rate, not least because I'm father to two young children, but I think it's sort of demographics, demographic change is one of the real central issues of our politics and I'm not sure we talk about it enough, if I'm honest. So I'm very excited to talk to you. And perhaps my own sort of slightly more specific focus or interest in this is from the perspective of young men and the kind of coupling or lack of coupling that's taking place in our society.

2:01Why is that? What can we do to address it? It's something that I'm really personally interested in. Not to say we have to talk about it just because I'm interested in it, but, you know, I think it could be a good thing for us to talk about. But regardless, there's politics here too. Do incentives work? Can we do anything at a policy level to address a declining birth rate? So, yeah, like I said, can't wait to see you. See you soon. Hi, Oli. Thanks so much for your message. It's great that you're interested as a man because I do agree with you that this is an issue which is not talked about enough, but also it tends to be seen as a female-only issue.

2:40and actually it's obviously a deeply human issue that affects us all. And if you've got two young children, I hope you're actually going to be semi-awake in our interview. See you then. Bye. In Japan, couples can rent a grandchild in order to make them feel less bereft on special occasions. In South Korea, dog stroller sales have overtaken pram sales. In Italy, villagers are giving away homes for free with an added cash bonus if you have a child. And in France, deaths outnumbered births for the first time since the Second World War in 2025. Around the world, nurseries are shrinking and schools are closing.

3:19The fertility rate is at its lowest ever. Governments and grandparents alike are panicking. So what's actually going on? There's no single answer, but rather an amalgamation of economic, cultural and societal factors which have completely overhauled how we live, work and love in the past few decades. I'm Olly Dougmore and you're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. I'm joined today by Camilla Cavendish, author of Generation Maybe, why we're having fewer children and what it means for us all. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Camilla Cavendish, thank you so much for joining us today.

3:55How are you? I'm very well indeed, thank you. Very glad to have you in the studio. You've had a long and very interesting career. You worked at McKinsey before turning to journalism. You were awarded the Paul Foote Award for your coverage of child protection injustices. Then you turned to government, working as the head of David Cameron's policy unit from 2015 to 2016. Since then, you've had a visiting fellowship at Harvard. But you're joining us today to talk about your new book, Generation Maybe, Why We Are Having Fewer Children and What It Means for Us All. What persuaded you to write the book?

4:25So I wrote another book some years ago, which was about the ageing world. And I went round to different countries and looked at how rapidly we're ageing and also how people are actually living longer better. And I felt quite optimistic about some of that. But in the course of writing that book, I did a lot of interviews which made me realise that we are accelerating the ageing process because the birth rate is falling so dramatically. And it was really in Japan that I started to interview young women about why they weren't having kids. So it wasn't just about aging. I suddenly found myself with young women saying, well, you know, you've got great careers often for the first time in their lives.

5:08And they were really emphatic. They didn't want to take on the mother-in-law, especially. They didn't want a husband. And they really wanted to prioritize a different kind of life. And I think a lot of what's happening in Southeast Asia, where birth rates are really low, is partly about misogyny and men not having caught up. And in Japan still, I mean, it's unbelievably difficult for women to juggle everything. But after I published that book, I came back to this issue and started realising that this is across the whole world. And one of the completely extraordinary things is we can all come up with individual reasons.

5:48So in the UK, people will say at the moment, for example, maternity care is terrible. Women are scared of having children. But, you know, that doesn't explain why Italy's got a low birth rate or why the UAE has a lower birth rate than Germany. And then other people will talk about housing costs, which genuinely are an issue for a lot of couples. But again, it doesn't explain the whole thing. So I started looking at what might explain all this. I also started to ask myself, you know, does it matter? because I've always been an environmentalist, so I don't want to see the global population going up any further.

6:25And that was my starting point. But then I started to realise the global population is going to peak very soon, sooner than we thought, which is a good news story. But we're going to go pretty fast down the other side. And the slope of that curve means that we're going to have to change everything, you know welfare systems pensions everything else it's going to make it harder for young people and also what really motivated me was that there's a lot of people missing out and that's what I hadn't expected to find this is not just a story of empowerment this is actually a story about heartache and a lot of it as you know you said to me earlier is um is hidden yeah I there's so much that answer you know even even just the quick like does it matter because i i start thinking about to i'm making this more personal than i anticipated early on in the conversation but i just i think about the sort of the things that provide meaning in my life now and were it not for my children i actually don't know what the answer to that question would be for me right now it's like it's like you know achieving i often talk to my friends about fatherhood it's like it's almost like achieving this different plane of consciousness or like emotional connection with other human beings and and i know that's not necessarily what you were saying then does it matter but that's just what i started to think about but i i think we should draw a distinction here early on i know you just did a little bit in your answer and you do it in the book as well that there is a difference isn't there between people who are intentional about choosing to have a child-free future and And those where it's unintentional, where in fact, even they may desire the opposite and are unable to for a variety of reasons.

8:12You know, whether it's the material conditions, which is, you know, a method of analysis that I would probably lean towards in their life. But also this sort of crisis of coupling and people have called it a flirt recession. You know, I'm sure we'll talk about that a bit. or I know as well in the Financial Times reading John Byrne Murdoch who's sort of drawn a relationship perhaps between that coupling and the rise of the smartphone. I mean, there are so many things for us to talk about. Maybe we should start with relationships and obviously traditionally the first step to having children is finding a partner to have them with.

8:50What's your work illuminated about that? What have you found? So that's one of the many things that really surprised me And by the way, I've never heard flirt recession. I'm going to start using that. That's great. Yeah, I like it. You're quite right. The distinction between intentionally very happily child-free people and involuntary childless people is one I make very clearly in the book. And there are lots of people who are choosing not to have kids, and that's totally fine. I mean, that is not a problem. And that's actually part of a whole set of choices that we've given people, which is great.

9:24But the second biggest reason that women give for not having kids after saying, I didn't want any, is they can't find a reliable partner. And that's actually, I mean, we're mainly talking about straight people here. But that is a really striking finding and it goes right across most industrialised countries. and that's what's shifted I think in the last 20 years so you know before the millennium as it were I mean we the birth rates were falling but it was largely because people were shacking up with someone and then having fewer kids now what's happening is there are just fewer couples around and that is a really big completely new thing in the world which we haven't quite got our heads round yet yeah i my thoughts around this are sort of quite focused on both the uk and america but some of the stats that jump out to me at least initially for example the fact that 51 of young men aged between 18 and 24 have not approached a woman in real life to to ask them out which to me is like an extraordinary statistic to think about there are there are other things as well but a lot of my analysis on this and i'd be interested to hear your perspective is it a why do you think that sort of gap that coupling gap is taking place is it because men need to get their acts together is it like what what's your what's your analysis what's going on there so yeah i mean um yeah i mean a lot of people would say men need to get their act together and um as somebody who you know i have three sons and live with four blokes so i'm kind of And I've become increasingly sympathetic to men over the course of writing this book.

11:14I'm the opposite way around. I've got a wife and two daughters. Oh, that's nice. Okay, well, there we are. We're in the same boat.

11:22What's happened partly is that women have outpaced men in higher education dramatically. And again, this is something I hadn't really realised. It's really women are ahead now in double digits in most countries that we can think of, even in some sub-Saharan African countries, which are beginning to grow their university sector. So women are more likely to apply for university. They're more likely to get into university. They're more likely to graduate. That leads them on to have good jobs. That leads them on more often to become the breadwinner than we've seen in the past. And that's really putting men on the back foot.

11:54And it's making that particular group of graduate women quite uneasy because a lot of the statistics suggest that graduate women still kind of want to graduate. I mean, we're so old fashioned. The other thing that comes across, we are so modern in one way. And underneath all of this, we are so old fashioned. So fundamentally, you interview men and women and women. And this is shown, I mean, like Chinese women, for example, on dating sites, they're going for the guys with the money. I mean, and the blokes don't care about that. I mean, we really are. Anyway, we haven't broken all those sort of norms.

12:34And in fact, there's a wonderful study from Sweden which showed that if a woman starts out earning her husband, if they're married, the relationship is much more likely to break up because both sides are unhappy. Because it kind of does something to our sort of traditional concept. So that is a problem that women are struggling to find men who they regard at their own level. And that has an impact all the way down the scale. So there's a whole lot of different things that are going on with non-graduate men and women, actually. And they are also really affected by, as you said earlier, the material conditions.

13:14I mean, costs of housing in certainly in big cities are just, you know, it's becoming impossible. You need to live near your parents to get support because basically everyone now has to have, you have to be a double income household. I mean, it's getting harder and harder to afford to do any of this. but also what women are reporting is that if what they regard as the most suitable men are really taken further up the ladder, they're fishing in a sort of smaller pool. Meanwhile, the men are getting more and more rejected and uneasy. And, I mean, one of the things I actually love is that stat that's gone viral about Bumble, women setting their filter at six foot.

13:53I mean, most men are not six foot. I think you might be on it anyway, but you know what I mean? Just with a Cuban. heal. Well, exactly. And that is also happening, right? People are then sort of slightly changing their... But to some extent, yes, we women are slightly our own worst enemies. But I think that analysis is also a bit unfair. Because what women want and have always wanted is somebody who's kind of reliable and is going to show up and actually be there and earn an income. And a lot of women, by the way, are now going at a loan. So what you see, particularly in places like Denmark, is women in their 40s who have resorts.

14:29I mean, these are mostly graduate women. They are basically finding a sperm donor and they're having kids on their own. That was not what they intended to do. But I've interviewed a lot of those women who are, you know, they're great. They're great people. They're highly eligible people in every sense. And they just can't find, in terms of the straight women I'm talking about, a bloke who matches up. Then you've got the political divide. So we've seen, obviously, there's been a lot of coverage of that, that men and women seem to be pulling away in terms of their politics, and that's particularly acute in America.

15:02It's least acute in Australia, weirdly. But also that, of course, affects, I mean, Democrat women are not going to date Republican-leaning men. So that, again, because you've got the six-foot problem, then you've got the Republican problem. So that, again, narrows it. But the tragedy for everybody, I mean, the tragedy for everybody is obvious, but the tragedy is most acute for men. So what I think we're seeing is overlooked men falling out of all of this. So we've seen, you know, blue collar wages stagnating. We've seen men. Deindustrialisation means men are being pushed into the gig economy. They're not even getting the kind of pink collar jobs that Richard Reeves writes so passionately about.

15:46I used to chair Frontline, which is a social work charity. One of our big things was a drive to get more men into social work because, you know, kids, boys identify with men. They're really powerful role models. If men see environments like social work or indeed teaching where there are very few people who look like them, they're much less likely to do it. And also, of course, the irony is feminised jobs have lower status in our society. So again, men are reluctant to do them. But all of these things are pulling the rug out from underneath men and women are then seeing them as less eligible. And we've got to get out of that cycle, I think.

16:26Yeah, I think particularly young guys, I think there's this cycle. It's almost like a feedback loop or it's self-perpetuating whereby it's hard to approach a woman and be rejected to understand that everyone in the interaction you go up and ask someone out and they say no thanks I've got a boyfriend no thanks I'm interested, everyone in that interaction is fine someone politely says no to you, go about your day, that is the difference I think between I think it's true of business I think it's true of social interactions being comfortable with that rejection is really important but initially that happening for the first time is quite a scary complex, difficult thing for a young person to do then there's like it's two sides because the other side of it is there's this kind of low friction um low calorie if you like like alternative that exists online which is the sort of sprawling network of pornography that exists out there and that's there on the sort of romantic sexual side then equally you're seeing this increase the trend of i've seen it described as financial nihilism whereby younger people are sort of taking this approach basically because of the widening gap well actually it's coming down a little bit recently but broadly speaking the widening gap between real incomes and real house prices and that unaffordability gap where you're saying to someone in london for example you know to say for a deposit is going to take you about 25 to 30 years and they go do you know what that is so unrealistic that is so far on my horizon i am actually just going to get into crypto i'm going to give a go at sports betting you know and so there's this i can get rich by just putting my money into nfts or ethereum or or some other crazy get-rich scheme.

18:13And so rather than all of the things that you're talking about, what makes someone attractive traditionally enough? Again, we should be really clear. We are, by the nature of this conversation, we're not talking sort of like broad scope. All women think X is attractive, but there's a degree of generalisation that has to be made here, right? In general, you're talking about people who have resources, or at least maybe a plan to secure them in the future. We're talking about people who are kind, Because if you're going to get pregnant for nine months and then give birth and then look after the child, I think in an ideal world, you would want to be partnered with someone who's going to care for you and care for the child that you have with them.

18:48Let's also be honest. Not everybody is saving for it to buy a house. Yeah. Right. So rent is a huge part of this. Massive. Picture. A lot of people, actually, what really matters to them is not necessarily being able to ever buy a house, but live near their parents and have that support network. Yeah. And there is, I mean, you know, there's a huge variation, obviously, in interviews between women who highly empowered women who might work at places like we're sitting in now who might say, you know, I want a guy who's going to change nappies. And lots of other women who actually, they're asking for something different, which is they're asking for a guy who's going to show up and be kind.

19:29And your point about kindness is so right. And so many men are so kind. and yet we portray them, I do think we have to change the narrative a bit about men in our society. I mean, I think part of this is there are alpha men in this whole story who are getting away with murder, right? There's this situationship thing where, you know, you're dating someone, but it's not official. You're seeing him all the time, but he never commits to even spending Saturday with you. I mean, there are a lot of men who are getting a lot of the dates who are, you know, getting away with it, I think. and women are very reluctant to challenge that.

20:05So that's happening, no doubt about it. But your point about rejection, I think, is so profound because one of the most interesting interviews I did, which was the hardest one to get, was with a guy called Dr. Robin Hadley who has actually done a doctorate in overlooked men and he himself really wanted children and never had them and ended up interviewing a whole lot of men, working class men who've missed out. And one of the things he says, because these men are, you know, they're not going to talk. They're very reluctant to talk about this stuff. One of the things he says is that men, certainly certain types of men, take a lot longer to recover from that kind of rejection you just talked about, Oli.

20:50And the hurt and the difficulty that that ensues, you know, and he's talked about, you know, the woman he was initially with, at some point they split up and she went on quite quickly to have two kids with someone else. And it took him years to get over that. So that, again, that's one of those things that we don't always look at and we don't talk about when we sort of brand all men as incels falling down a hole. I think there's a lot of good men who are really striving and society is not giving them a lot of support. There's even basic things. Like at the moment in Britain, paternity leave is only two weeks and maternity leave is much longer.

21:29Now, if the woman is the breadwinner, that creates a terrible imbalance because if she's earning more, it actually skews the household income. What we need is we need for blokes to get equality and that kind of thing. And everybody says, oh, you know, men don't want to take paternity leave. But actually, they might do. But again, we've got to change the narrative about men and make it possible because a lot of men are completely trapped. If they do take even two weeks paternity leave, they're kind of looked down on by their employer. It's still slightly suspect. Until we change that, we're never going to get to anything like real equality.

22:03As someone who's taken paternity leave recently and like particularly the first time around, easier the second. But it just felt so soon to go from like having this newborn child. And then, you know, two weeks pass. It's all right. I'm back to work then. See you later. Good luck, basically. But I just wanted to pick up on what you said earlier about the way you described the profound experience of being a father is so powerful. And we don't hear that very often. And actually, the other thing I realised, I felt really guilty in the process of writing this book, because I thought, I haven't ever talked about the fact that my children and being a mother are the most important thing to me.

22:44I've never talked about it. I've never written about it. Because certainly in my generation, you just didn't really mention your kids. I remember in the pandemic, you know, having all the Zoom calls with my colleagues at the Financial Times. And it was so fun. I mean, we all laughed, you know, all the women laughed because the blokes were starting to go, oh, well, you know, I've just been, you know, doing homework with my three-year-old. I'm thinking, yeah, great, you know, we've done that for years. But actually, well, it was kind of, I mean, it was great in the sense, but it was sort of like, oh, have you not noticed?

23:10But of course, we have all been silently doing this for decades, right, with nobody thanking us. But I do think one of the groups that I have actually become much more sympathetic to and worried about is the women who want to stay home, the women who want to spend the first couple of years of their child's life actually staying home. And in fact, your point about the Scandi's and equal leave, one of the people I met who really changed my view was this wonderful Swedish woman who's in the book. And she told me that in the end, she'd given up her job in Sweden and her husband was worried and no one does that in Sweden.

23:48It's really weird because she said they'll pay for your kid to go into institutional childcare, but they won't pay for you to look after your own kid at home. And actually that really struck me. She said, you know, some kids really need their parents. So again, you know, have we kind of slightly over-egged all this? Because one group of women, you know, the group that I sit in, you know, graduate women who actually have been lucky enough to have good careers. You know, have we kind of spun a narrative which is you don't really have to talk about your kids and you can kind of get it done on the side?

24:20And I sort of think, yeah, I think it's all hidden. So your points as a man are really valuable because, as you said, it's kind of considered a bit weird. It's still considered a bit weird to take paternity leave or be an active father. Yeah. But that's what everybody wants. Everybody wants to. But they're still finding it difficult to say that. Yeah, I think so. We're going to take a quick break now. We will be back after this.

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26:41Maybe we should talk a little bit about stepping off the career ladder because and how it connects to and how it connects to norms actually because what you're talking about there is norms. You're talking about social norms and what you say and what you don't and I think it also, that then also connects to the way that we are, you know, pursuing a sort of a liberal idea of people having equal value and people's choices being valid. And that obviously then has consequences because if I'm conscious, I'm really actually sort of suspect about making this argument, but I don't know because I see where it leads, but I'm, I wonder like, is it that surprising if we, I think rightly say to women, it's entirely your choice, whether or not you have children, you are not defined by that fact.

27:26You shouldn't be defined by that fact. your right to pursue a career and do anything that a man does in our society, you should have that right. Yeah, of course. If we then see a decline in, you know, people having kids, shouldn't we be surprised? I think the, yeah, I mean, the objective is not to get people to have more kids. The objective is to help people be fulfilled in the way they want. And I suppose that's why I've become so passionate about this, is that every single piece of data in the world consistently over decades is showing that people are having fewer kids than they want. And some of that data is based on slightly willy surveys.

28:05Like, you know, you ask people at 22, how many children do you think the ideal family? And then they have fewer, but they consistently have fewer. But the new data is, I think, much more compelling, which is about regret. So, you know, in Canada, I think almost half of all the people in this latest survey said they wish they'd had more kids than they did, either having a child when they hadn't. And I think that is, that's the gap that we've fallen into. And that's why it matters. I mean, all the other things, the economic things and the welfare things are going to be very tough. And we are going to go through this transition anyway.

28:41I mean, 800 primary schools are due to close in England in the next five years. And that's what is now. And that wave will then start to hit universities. And it means, you know, we're going to have fewer and fewer young people paying pensions. And we won't talk about triple lock today, but, you know, all of that. But that's we're going to have to endure. But that's not why it really matters. Why it really matters is your point about choice. Is are people actually getting what they want to choose? I'm not sure they are. And that's really why I wrote the book. That thing about regret actually factored so much in our decision making when we were talking about starting a family because we were unsure about timing.

29:19We were thinking about, and this will lead us to the question I want to ask you, which is about economics, material conditions and how they compare geographically. But, you know, our conversation was essentially, can we afford to do this right now? Should we do it right now? to which my sort of point of view was well there will always be a more ideal time assuming growth in earnings as we develop in our careers it's only going to move in one direction but two things to add on that one is if we have a slightly more historical and geographical view we are some of the wealthiest people who have ever existed in human the scope of human history i think we can manage it and then your point on regret which is where i was going with this is the sooner we start, the more time we have with our children.

30:02And as you get to the end of your life, are we seriously going to like on my deathbed? Am I going to say, do you know what? I'm really glad I waited until I was 34 before I had my, or am I going to say, what the fuck was I? Yeah. But yes, I got it. I got it. Oh, 10 years too many. Or am I actually going to say, do you know what? I wish I had another year. And that's, and that's the way I thought about it. And that's what led to us going there. But what you're talking about is a very clear decision. And this is what children are no longer an obligation. They've become an option. And they've become a really, for a lot of couples, a really complex decision, an active decision, which is also actually terribly difficult.

30:42So I found this amazing woman in Ireland who's a counsellor and she started a counselling service for couples in their 30s who can't decide whether they want to have a child. And she's fascinating because she says, you know, if you look at the list of the cons versus the pros, the cons are really obvious, right? All the opportunity cost, all those things. The pros are abstract, like, well, will I feel that I love them? You know, will they love me? I mean, it is very difficult. And once it becomes a really analytical decision, yeah, I think your concept is interesting, actually. You know, it does go to something about regret, which is also it's a very fuzzy concept.

31:22Yeah. And it is easier to leave it later on later. And so one of the many other things I talk about in the book is we are leaving everything later. And that is one of the major trends that we're seeing. I meant to ask you about material conditions. So let's really talk about the economics now. I mean, how do you rank the economy and the material conditions of people who are considering having children as a factor in that decision? And crucially, what's the geographical context and perspective on this? You know, when we look around the world, does it paint a slightly different picture? What do we see?

31:52Yeah, so I can't give a completely comprehensive answer to that because nobody knows. But what is astonishing is that this wave of childlessness is sweeping almost the whole world, including even India. So Tamil Nadu in India has a lower birth rate than the UK or many European countries. The poorest places in the world are still having more kids. So Bihar in India, for example, or, you know, a lot of sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously, we had a long period where as the West got wealthier, we had fewer kids because we were making those trade-offs between the possibilities of career and children. but we still it's not a it's not a sort of absolute correlation and claudia golden who's the um nobel prize winner at harvard who's who's very kindly um giving me some help with this book she her work on greedy jobs she coined the phrase greedy jobs which is the kind of job where you know basically you're flying around the world you're constantly looking at your phone and you're terribly full of yourself and it's all very exciting but you actually don't have any time You don't have any time to sustain your relationship.

33:12Maybe not that many friends. Well, we all know what they are. And they're the professional jobs that actually every graduate kind of aspires to. I did it for two years at McKinsey and, you know, wasn't any good at it and got out. And I mean, a lot of your listeners will have read gold in on this. You know, that has definitely meant that the person, if we're talking about a couple, the person who's not doing the greedy job ends up with a vast amount of the childcare. and that can cause real strain on relationships. And of course, because we have this phenomenon where professional people marry or end up with, partner with professional people much more and more and more often, both sides are kind of like, well, why should I be the one to sacrifice?

33:52And I think children are increasingly seen as sacrifice. Back to your earlier point, but actually they are also quite a joy, although you don't feel that when you're in Sainsbury's at seven in the morning. I used to take mine to Sainsbury's at seven in the morning. It was the only place that was open and they'd all been up for two hours. But, you know, we've all been there. But that is partly a phenomenon. And that's also linked to big cities with professional jobs where housing is very expensive. So the birth rate in big cities has plummeted all over the world. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter where you are.

34:21You just don't want to, you're making trade-offs and you don't want to do it. But there's another thing that the mother, obviously there's a motherhood penalty, which is part of what Goldin's written about, where because of the cumulative effect of the time off you take, if you are in one of those professional jobs, it can be quite hard to get back in at the level you left. Now, that's not as true for other jobs, actually. But then there's this extraordinary thing called the fatherhood premium, which nobody can explain, which is men in professional jobs who become fathers end up earning even more, which, I mean, it's just really extraordinary and no one can quite explain it.

35:00And it may be because other men at the top of professional things think, oh, that's great. You become a dad. I mean, I don't actually know what it's about, but it weirdly accentuates the motherhood penalty. Now, we are talking here about fairly well-off people. So it's quite important to recognise that. But they're definitely a cumulative effect. And one of the things I argue in the book, which I felt really strongly about for years, is part of this is the ridiculous career timetable that we set for ourselves. We're all going to live till 80, 90. You know, a lot of us will be quite healthy into our 70s, but we make partner at 32.

35:38You know, all these professional systems are the same. They force you to accelerate your career in your early 30s, which is when you want to think about starting a family. And everybody thinks of careers as kind of linear and ascendant, and you have to keep going up. And the only way I survived in my career and had three kids was that I was very lucky. I got into journalism in my 30s and I basically worked four days a week and I refused every promotion I got offered for 10 years. And that's how I did it. And I did no international travel. And that's what I did. But if I ever say that to young women now, they look at me like I'm absolutely mad.

36:16So that's part of our concept is, you know, you've got to keep going up because if you don't keep going up, it's true. You do end up paying a motherhood penalty. But there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to come back in in our 40s have a successful career which is a much more flexible one i want to talk to you now about the 30 okay let's do fertility rate right so the uk fertility rate peaked in 1964 at 2.93 children we are now at 1.39 yeah many adults in the uk today will have come from a household with siblings it's estimated that by 2031 half of all families in the uk are estimated to be raising just one child what can we learn about the rise of only child families what does it mean and obviously I think you would probably think about China in this and how this might shape the future of our society so as an only child I'm really obsessed with this issue because I've spent a lot of my life being sort of you know scrutinized and you know are you social you know are you really selfish are you There's a lot of preconceptions about only children.

37:19And China is a great case study because obviously the one-child policy, we now have what they call the 4-2-1 problem, which is an only child looking after two parents and four grandparents. And, you know, the problem with this is there are just so many different studies and I'm attracted to the ones that say, hey, you know, only children do really well at school and they're actually really well adjusted. There are other ones that tend slightly leaner. the Chinese ones lean slightly more to parents give almost too much attention to kids, you know, and we're all, as a result, you know, we only children are a bit kind of sensitive and we're not very good at conflict, which I think there is some truth in that.

38:00But I do think, yeah, one of the things I'm trying to highlight is we are moving into a world of only children. And that is, that does slightly put the onus on parents, I think, to think about what are we, do you know do we need to be careful we don't overly coddle those kids because you know they're every child is so precious and one of the things i suppose i've found about having three is just that you then can't control the chaos and that's probably quite healthy for them they might disagree um but i do think compared to my own childhood that you know they're slightly healthy so i do think we need to yeah we just need to think about what the absence of siblings might mean.

38:42I think there's, I'll talk about policy now, but obviously that's very wide-ranging and there's a conversation about the welfare state, pensions, etc. But just on the point about if a government wanted to implement policy measures to try and reverse the declining birth rate, what might they consider? I think people are aware of, for example, Orbán and the efforts in in Hungary to do something about this. But for example, have policy incentives ever worked to do something here? Are there other instances where they have worked? So this is a great question. Originally, I had a whole chapter on, you know, because I'm a policy nerd, I had a whole chapter in this book on different governments and what they've done.

39:29And then I realised that almost none of them achieved anything. So I actually have erased that chapter, because it wasn't very interesting. And one of the things that's striking is how similar the approaches have been from different governments. And Hungary, I've looked at very closely, you're right, because it's always held up by the right as a great example. It's actually not achieved as much of a jump in the birth rate as people had hoped or not sustained. So initially, they basically have paid a lot of baby bonuses, essentially, to people. And that did lift the birth rate for a while. But it may be that it's a temporary effect because people I thought, great, I'll get on with it and grab the baby bonus, which would be rational, and then maybe not have another one.

40:12And these things are cultural. Everything we've talked about has been cultural. And governments really are not very good at affecting cultural change and probably also shouldn't. So China, which had this terrible one-child policy, which was an example of extreme coercion, is now moving in the opposite direction because it's so worried about its birth rate. And what I see is it's using a very similar model with local officials are ringing up women and saying, have you had your period? I mean, we are, you know, so we're getting some of the autocratic countries are basically going down a similar route of coercion.

40:54That's not working because women are far too savvy now to fall for that. Well, I'm glad to say. the things that I think do work France is quite a good example because it's had very very long standing benefits they're reliable and predictable and they're much more flexible for example in France you know they'll give you effectively a voucher if you want to stay home you can use that if you want to use childcare you can use that and they've had long standing women's employment rights in the workplace and a lot of other European countries especially Italy they still don't have that so that's partly why France's birth rate has remained a bit more stable the UK actually had a mini baby boom in part of the Blair years which is fascinating no one has quite explained why that is it's possible it had something to do with Sure Start I think Sure Start was this extraordinary wraparound childcare and also a lot of women actually took advantage of the Blair system I think, you know, the Blairites, like many governments, thought we're going to get women back into work.

42:03Every government really thinks we're going to get women back into work as fast as we possibly can. And they effectively pay us to do that. A lot of the women in that particular period of the mini baby boom in the UK actually took the money and stayed home for a bit, which is, I think, I mean, I think that bears, that would really warrant a lot more study. But the other thing is just visibility. I think Sure Start helped people to feel that they were seeing children, that it was normal to have children, that they were with other people who had children right across the community. The places I found in the world that have bucked the trend, and some of them are just towns or even companies, are places where children are much, much more visible.

42:43and one of the things one of the big underlying trends that I think we're seeing which has not been studied yet really is that actually it's a social contagion thing and this has something to do with social media but it's also about if you if you now think it's normal for example to have one child if you have three kids you're regarded as an outlier so making children much more visible really is something that we could all do but that means you know bringing children into the workplace I mean, you know, offices don't have creches. I mean, children are kind of squirreled away in our society. And increasingly people are not, you know, they're complaining about noise.

43:22They're complaining about we're becoming quite anti-children right across the world. So I do think that's part of it. It's one of the things I find quite, before I had kids even, quite dislocating about being, working in central London. One of the things I very often feel was like, where are the children? And I appreciate London is actually, does a pretty good job. There are very mixed boroughs and there are schools in places you wouldn't necessarily expect them. But certainly in Central, it's this sort of cathedral of glass and concrete where all the kind of, you know, the workers arrive and they increase shareholder value and they do all their GDP stuff.

43:57And then they leave and at the end of the day sort of looking around and it doesn't feel like a real place in that sense. I just, I think I'm going to do closing remarks here, Camilla, because we've run out of time. I did want to ask you another question about sort of 11 solutions at the end of the book and which one you might sort of put forward. But I don't think we'd have time to answer such a broad question. But I just I'm thinking about visibility and the way people think about these things and the joy. And it just reminded me of a conversation I was having a few months ago. I was at dinner and I stopped my mind.

44:30I was sat next to Jill Lepore and then there were all these people who were about my age around her. And we were doing that thing that young parents do where they'll go, oh, you're so fucking tired. yeah i'm tired blah blah blah small talk and then i remember jill just went yeah i bet you're tired everyone's been tired all of human history they were they were tired they were tired they managed and and then the other thing she said which i will probably stick with and hold for a long time which you like another way of thinking about this is you have this little thing that is with you a lot of the time and they are this incredible source of creativity and inspiration and comedy and alternate ways of looking at and thinking about the world and yeah you can look at each other and go god aren't i tired or and particularly if you're a journalist you do something creative the other thing you think it was like isn't this incredible that i have this thing this person that's with me a lot of the time that has this capacity to inspire and i just i thought yeah I think Jill's probably right on that one.

45:31Camilla, thank you so much. I thought this was so interesting. I absolutely love talking to you. Love talking to you. Thank you so much. That was Camilla Cavendish. I'm Oli Dugmore, and you've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. We'll see you next week.

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