Why we are having fewer children than we want
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Do you have kids? Do you want them? Could you afford them? A new global study by the United Nations has found that one in five people haven't had or expect they won't have the number of children that they want. And they say the main reasons for this are the cost of being a parent and not being able to find a suitable partner. So on today's episode, we're going to look at which countries have been most impacted by falling fertility rates and what they can do to address it. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. ♪

And joining me here in the studio is the BBC's population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty. Hello, welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me again. So we're talking about fertility rates, which we know have been declining for decades. What do we actually mean by fertility rates and is that different to birth rates? So fertility rate is the average number of children a woman will have over the course of her lifetime or her reproductive years. And that's different from, say, fertility as an idea, which is your ability to...

or not to conceive. There's biological fertility, there's also things like social fertility. So you may have health problems that stop you from conceiving, but you also may not have a partner. And what is significant about this study? This is about fertility intentions, right? So it's the number of children that people say they want to have and whether they think that they will achieve that or whether if they're older they have already achieved that. And it's about the gap. The findings here are about the gap there. People just not having the number of kids

that they want. So as part of this report, the UN Population Fund surveyed 14,000 people in 14 different countries. And these were a mix of low to high income countries and countries with low fertility and high fertility, like South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and Nigeria has one of the highest.

And the findings were different. For example, South Korea, they reported the highest number of people who found financial limitations were preventing them from having a child. And then on the other end of the scale was Sweden, only 19% of people versus 58% in South Korea said financial limitations were stopping them.

But there was a really interesting group of countries in the middle, which we haven't heard from much before when it comes to these fertility ideals. Places like India and Indonesia, where people are reporting, again, financial limitations, but lots of other issues that are stopping them having the number of kids that they'd like. Was it just women who were asked and from a range of ages as well? It was all adults and men and women. But when it comes to trying to find conclusions from different age groups, it's difficult because the sample sizes were too small. But this...

is just a pilot study and UNFPA plans to do more research in 50 countries actually later in the year. So what the UNFPA said here is that most people want two or more children and a lot of people aren't fulfilling that. And what does that mean if we're not having two or more children? Well, it means that essentially from a human rights perspective, people aren't fulfilling their life ideals. But from a wider societal perspective, it means that population

populations are going to start declining. So if on average a woman has less than 2.1 children, you can't have 0.1 of a child, but that's an average, then the population of that country will decline. It's a little bit higher in places where there's higher child mortality and it's a little bit lower in places where there's immigration that offsets these declines. But in general, if every couple doesn't have 2.1 of their own children, the population will decline. And that's basically to replace, right? To replace the couple.

Exactly, yeah. And the main reason that people have talked about are financial reasons. What are some of the other reasons people have given? So overwhelmingly it was financial reasons, things like housing and job insecurity and the cost of having a child. And the cost of having a child have increased so much generation on generation, not just because things like education are getting more expensive, but

But our expectations of parenting are changing. So I spoke to a couple in India who have been toying with the idea of having a second child for five years now since their daughter was born. And they were saying that they just want to invest in her. And I was asking, well,

Did your parents make the same calculation when they had you and your siblings and said, no, it's very different? Their parents didn't invest much in education. They didn't feel the pressure to send their daughter to swimming lessons or drawing lessons. What about being able to find the right person to have a family with? Yeah, this was interesting. So overall, it was 14% of people said this was the reason that they weren't having children that they wanted.

And that was higher than infertility or difficulty conceiving, just a little bit higher, but I think really interesting that it was. It was just 14%. So compared to 39% who listed financial limitations, it was less, but still really interesting that that's a factor across all these countries. Are these drops in fertility rates due to the fact that women are waiting longer before they have their first child? So that is definitely a big factor. And there's two reasons. One is that when you have

a big gap in generations. When one generation has children much later than the other, that's going to cause a drop in the fertility levels. But the other reason is that if people put off having their first child, they have their first at, say, 38, 39, it becomes less likely they're going to have a second or a third. And that's definitely a pattern that we see playing out. And it's something that

You know, some of the case studies I spoke to for my reporting spoke about they can't afford to have a child now. They'll think about it in a couple of years, but maybe they won't be able to then. And what about health interventions like IVF? Many African countries don't have access to IVF, the most expensive for fertility treatments, but also basic things like regular checkups, you know, and antibiotics to stop infection. All of these things cost.

were not treated can lead to infertility. And there was a gynecologist and very eminent gynecologist in Nigeria said that infertility is the biggest reason that women across Africa visit the gynecologist. You could imagine the governments of different countries might be quite alarmed by this research. They're very, very keen on populations being stable or growing because of all of these economic reasons.

And government policies on fertility rates have changed. They've kind of been swinging back and forth in many different countries. What are governments trying to do to address this?

Well, they might be alarmed, but in a way they might be relieved in seeing that people want to have more children. If you can just remove the barriers that are in the way, you could help people to have more children. The problem is the barriers are so deep and big, like housing. You know, a housing crisis is a very difficult thing to solve. The cost of education is difficult to tackle. Unemployment is a huge problem for governments to tackle. So,

In a way, this is a positive message in that if you could just sort out these problems, people will have children. A much more difficult problem is people not wanting to have children at all. But that's the interesting thing about this report. You know, the UNFPA has, over the years since it was first set up, focused a lot on the unmet need for contraception. So that means people who don't have access to contraception and are having more children than they want. And this is a bit of a shift in this report. But with that problem, there was a solution. Contraception.

improve access to it, get it to people, they will use it, they want it. Whereas with this, it's much more difficult. The problems are much more complicated and deeply entrenched, really, and the kind of things that governments will want to sort out anyway. So there's no easy solutions here. Talk me through some of the things that governments in places like China and South Korea are trying to boost fertility rates and is any of it working?

Interestingly, this report said quite strongly that some things just aren't working. And one of those is baby bonuses. So that's upfront payments offered to couples to convince them to have a child. The research here is really mixed. Quite often, it seems people who intended to have another kid anyway were just bringing that forward. These are also really expensive policies, right?

So they cost governments a lot, but it's not clear that they're really boosting fertility rates. And another thing the UNFPA said is a problem here is restricting access to health care and also any sort of coercive policies that they could create a backlash among people who ultimately see this as a very personal choice. So people don't want the pressure. I mean, it's that age old thing. You don't want your parents asking you when are you going to have a kid, when are you going to get married? But this at the next level, if it's coming from the government.

Yeah, so they're warning against these kind of knee-jerky, panicky responses that will just put people off. You know, nobody wants...

Yeah, like you say, the parents, let alone the government telling them what to do in their personal family and sex life. But if a lot of this is financial, there are things that the government can do. Maternity leave or tax breaks or things like that. It's interesting, though, there's been a lot of research on what works and what doesn't work. And in the 90s, in Nordic countries put a lot of effort into gender equal policies. So they have really advanced maternity and paternity leave policies.

policies. And a general culture where mums and dads have a more equal role in parenting, dads will as often leave the office if a kid is sick as mums will. And that did have a boost in fertility in the 90s and 2000s. But that has fallen back a little bit. Those policies are good for a host of other reasons, but they don't seem to be having a huge effect on fertility. At the same time, a body like the UN would advise that those are good policies to

to pursue. And it's kind of reluctant to say that they aren't working. We did an earlier episode of the podcast about how China had a matchmaking app, right, to get more couples to meet up in an attempt to increase fertility rates. Do these kind of more radical policies work? If you look at the results of this study, take South Korea, for example, 58% of people saying they're not having the number of kids they want because of

of the costs, financial limitations. And I've spoken to people there and what comes up again and again is the cost of education. All these grind schools that parents feel pressured to send their kids to. And they're really expensive. Interestingly, the government in South Korea isn't really interested in tackling that. And that's something concrete that they could do. But I've spoken to people there who say that's the jewel in our crown. Our education system is what dragged our country from low to middle to high income, to a high income country. So they're proud of it.

And without the kind of willingness to tackle big things like that, like your education system, like housing, like unemployment, I can't see anywhere making a dent on this. Stephanie, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That is it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What's in the World from the BBC World Service, and we'll see you next time.