Panicology
Page 3
There is little doubt that countries take a decline in the population seriously and try to reverse it. Russia’s President Putin has described the baby shortage as the country’s most acute problem and ordered parliament to give large financial incentives to women who have a second baby. Australia’s ‘one for mum, one for dad and one for the country’ campaign and the associated baby bonus cash payment, introduced in 2004, has tentatively been declared a success with the latest figures showing a small rise in the birth rate. And many European countries, including France, Italy and Poland, also offer financial incentives to mothers or families with children. But, if the incentives in the form of cash and savings offered in Singapore and Japan over a rather longer period are anything to go by, they are unlikely to have any lasting success. With surveys suggesting that it can cost several hundred thousand Euros to bring up a child, it will be surprising if cash sums of €1,000 or €2,000 have any impact on the underlying trends.
Population projections, UN’s ‘medium’ variant, selected countries
* * *
Millions 2005 2015 Percentage change
* * *
World 6465.7 7219.4 +12
The growing countries
Brazil 186.4 209.4 +12
China 1315.8 1393.0 +6
India 1103.4 1260.4 +14
Nigeria 131.5 160.9 +22
Pakistan 157.9 193.4 +22
Turkey 73.2 82.6 +13
US 298.2 325.7 +9
Stable and shrinking countries
Bulgaria 7.7 7.2 –7
France 60.5 62.3 +3
Germany 82.7 82.5 n/c
Italy 58.1 57.8 –1
Japan 128.1 128.0 n/c
Poland 38.5 38.1 –1
Russia 143.2 136.7 –5
UK 59.7 61.4 +3
* * *
Source: World Population Prospects, United Nations, www.un.org/esa, 2005 version.
One possible solution is to encourage immigration, but that is another story with another set of issues. The poor and relatively youthful countries of North Africa and Asia that are closest to Europe offer a large supply of potential immigrants, but will the ageing residents of Europe want them? It seems certain that continued modest migration will play a part in Europe’s policy, but the numbers involved are such that immigration cannot feasibly plug the gap left by the birth dearth. Spain would need 170,000 immigrants a year over the next fifty years to maintain a constant population size. Spain’s position is extreme, as it currently has few retired people but is forecast to have a large increase. To maintain a constant working age population, it would need an average 260,000 immigrants a year. But to maintain the current potential support ratio (the number of people of working age per older person), Spain would have to accept an annual average of 1.6 million immigrants every year. This is clearly impossible. Europe’s predicament might not end in tears, but serious adjustment in policy and expectations is required.
Overpopulation has been a popular theme in fiction, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Books and films have proposed that the problem can be easily resolved by embracing measures such as raising infants as food or by promoting euthanasia of everyone who reaches a certain age. So it seems paradoxical that the big issue likely to face most readers of this book is the impact of a shrinking population on their wealth and health in their old age.
Family Breakdown
‘A nation of unhappy families’ The Times
The down side of the increasing flexibility that makes later marriage more appealing is that ‘normal family life’ might feel like a thing of the past for most children. The media plays its part, sometimes giving the impression that society is crumbling in the face of delinquent youths, teenage pregnancies, single-parent families and a high divorce rate. But this panic-inducing story resulting from the rapid change in our society has, in contrast to many others that we live with, a distinctly political flavour.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has pinpointed absent fathers and family breakdown as two of the root causes of anti-social behaviour, and polls show that a majority of the public agrees with him. He has said that he does not criticize all the single mothers who work hard to give their children a good start in life, but he has pledged to change the tax and benefits system to ensure that there are real incentives for parents to get and stay married.
The Labour government has taken a different view during the past decade. It says that marriage is ‘a good thing’ but plans no action to support it, saying that policy must be ‘bias free’ when it comes to marriage, adding that love and compassion are what create strong families. While love and compassion are important, it has become increasingly hard, say the government’s critics, for families to survive and flourish without the protection of the law and a supportive financial regime. Indeed, traditional families have been hard hit by Labour’s tax reforms, including the removal of a tax allowance for married couples and the introduction of welfare credits that reward lone parents at the expense of low-income couples. The structure means that poorer couples, for whom income top-ups from the state are important, are much better off if they keep their relationships unofficial and, so far as the government is concerned, live separately. Getting married means that benefits are cut. One report, ‘Parents live apart to cash in on benefits system’,1 suggested that as many as one million couples in a committed sexual relationship live most of their time at separate addresses, and that such untraditional family structures primarily reflect financial considerations. An unemployed mother who leaves the unemployed father of her children could experience a rise in her standard of living of between 20 and 35 per cent.
It is, of course, impossible to be 100 per cent sure of any cause and effect when it comes to behaviours in society, but a number of important trends seem to be heading in the wrong direction, damaging the fabric of society, in Britain and a number of other countries. One shocking survey suggested that working parents spend only nineteen minutes a day with their children, just enough time for a quick breakfast or reading a bedtime story.2 Indeed, leaving children to their own devices, letting them learn about life from other teenagers and not providing good adult role models are frequently seen as being at the heart of the problem. Whatever the truth, the trends seem to be leaving a large number of unhappy and helpless families in their wake. One survey of Scotland’s mothers and fathers revealed that their principal concerns are balancing jobs and home life without the benefit of an extended family near by, having nowhere to turn for advice when the going gets tough, and worrying about how best to discipline unruly offspring. Three-quarters of those questioned said that they would consider counselling if it was available.3
A comprehensive assessment of the well-being of children and young people by UNICEF presented a report described as a ‘damning’ assessment of the ‘crisis of childhood that is blighting Britain’.4 The report measured well-being across more than twenty developed countries under a variety of headings such as education, relationships, behaviours and health. The top half of the well-being table was dominated by small north European countries including the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Relative child poverty was highest in three southern European countries (Portugal, Spain and Italy) and in three Anglophone countries (the US, the UK and Ireland). Roughly four out of five children in the countries under review lived with both parents, but the rates fell to below 70 per cent in the UK and the US. The percentage of children who said that their peers are ‘kind and helpful’ varied from above 80 per cent in some countries to less than 50 per cent in the Czech Republic and the UK. Fewer than 15 per cent of young people report being drunk on two or more occasions, but the figure rose to over one-quarter in the Netherlands and almost one-third in the UK. Over one-third of 11–15-year-olds in the UK, Switzerland and Canada had used cannabis.
Newspaper reports of the study – ‘Threadbare family lives’ and ‘Unhappy families’ were typical – focused not on Britain’s top-of-the-table performance on teenage pregnancies
, bullying and poor family relationships, but on the depressing conclusion that British children perceive themselves to be unhappier than their peers in other countries. Overall the UK was the country where the welfare of children suffered most, and America was the nearest rival. While politicians, think tanks and the press could build little consensus about what to do to improve the situation, it is clear that Britain has suffered from adverse trends. The country finds itself in a worse position on a number of counts than many others and is at a loss to know what to do about its delinquent children.
Among the key drivers is the fact that marriage has become seriously unpopular. Marriage rates in England and Wales are at their lowest since records began over 150 years ago. Just 24 men per thousand unmarried men got married in 2005, a drop from a rate of 28 in 2004 and 49 per thousand twenty years before. The sharp drop in the latest year was explained by new legislation aimed at reducing the number of ‘sham marriages’5 and the increasing popularity of getting married overseas, but there is no mistaking the underlying trend. The male marriage rates dropped below 50 only in a few exceptional years between the 1860s, when records began, and 1984, and the rate peaked at 78 in the early 1970s. Among the marriages that are occurring, an increasing proportion have an added complexity that might serve to weaken the traditional links within society, as they bring together two different nationalities, ethnic groups or religions. The increasing occurrence of second and third marriages gives rise to ever more extended and less tightly bound families.
The pattern of motherhood has also changed dramatically in recent decades even if the number of children born each year in England and Wales has been relatively stable – within 50,000 of the 650,000 of the recent years’ average. But over that time the average age of the mother has been increasing: in the 1960s British women were most fertile in their early twenties; that shifted to the late twenties and has now shifted to the early thirties. The mean age of mothers is now over twenty-nine, having increased by over three years in the last three decades, and the number of first-time mothers over thirty-five has trebled in fifteen years.
Mothers with old faces and young children are an increasingly common sight on Europe’s high streets as the average age of motherhood continues to rise in every European country for which records exist. The mean age of women at the birth of the first child is now around twenty-seven to twenty-nine years in most developed countries. In Spain, 13 per cent of first-time mothers are now over forty, double the proportion in England and Wales. Later births and later marriages are a result both of some women enjoying their freedoms and careers and of some men shying away from the traditional male role of providing financially for a wife and children.
Those women who are lucky enough to fall pregnant in their late thirties or forties get no thanks. So far as many newspapers are concerned, they are simply risking their health and that of the foetus – miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and pre-eclampsia are more common among older mothers-to-be. One doctor said that women who delay having children until they are thirty-five or over constitute a ‘major public health issue’, adding that they are more of a burden to society than teenage mums.
The papers now regularly report women aged over sixty giving birth. Britain’s oldest mother gave birth in 2006 at the age of sixty-three but a 66-year-old has given birth in Romania and a 65-year-old in India. This is as much a freak show as anything else but does show how medical techniques are extending the age at which women can conceive, even though most clinics will not accept women for IVF treatment over the age of forty-five. Plenty of women who have their first child at an older age end up with just the one child, and the swelling ranks of children growing up without brothers and sisters are giving rise to a new group of people that is of increasing interest to psychologists.
Teenage mothers are a constant source of interest to the newspapers. One story, ‘Mum believable’, told of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who was asked to give family planning advice to her peer group after four of her classmates became pregnant in quick succession. Another told the story of a girl who had had four abortions by the age of seventeen. Yet the percentage of all births to mothers under twenty years of age has been reasonably constant in Britain at between 6 and 9 per cent for the last two decades. The UK rate is only half of that seen in a number of eastern European countries, a little below that in the US, and at least double the rate seen in a number of the main European countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy.
However, the proportion of births to teenagers that are occurring outside marriage has increased sharply – it now stands at over 90 per cent compared to under 70 per cent two decades ago and barely one-third three decades ago. The rise in the proportion of births outside marriage is even greater for the mothers aged twenty to twenty-four – nearly 70 per cent now compared to just 15 per cent twenty-five years ago. Nearly 280,000 children were born out of marriage in the latest year, double the number of two decades ago and five times the number of three decades ago.
Once married, people can divorce – and divorce rates are high in Britain, up more than fivefold from 30,000 in the last forty years. Britain is beaten to the top of the world’s divorce league (when viewing divorces as a percentage of marriages) by primarily a number of eastern European countries. But the UK has a rate of over 50 per cent compared to between 40 and 50 per cent for the US, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The divorce rate in the countries of southern Europe, including Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy, is half that of Britain. They might be seeing strong rises – Italy, for example, has seen the number of divorces rise by 70 per cent in the last decade – but they are starting from a lower point. One report suggested that Italy faced a particular problem: the normal explanations for a marriage break-up – marrying too young, squabbling over money and meeting a new partner – have been surpassed by the problems arising from the unusually close attachment of Italian men to their mothers. Modern, young Italian women are less readily able, it seems, to offer the type of unconditional love that young men become accustomed to from their mothers.6
One academic study did at least conclude that ‘divorce works’, in that a comparison of the mental states two years before marital breakdown with two years afterwards showed an improvement, albeit modest, in ‘mental stress’.7 This is not to suggest, though, that a greater number of couples should dissolve their unions as those who split were normally the less happy among the married population. It seems that an increasing number of divorces among middle-aged couples are being prompted by women in a final bid for personal freedom, escaping from unfulfilling relationships, rather than the stereotype mid-life man dumping his long-term partner for the thrill of younger flesh.
As a consequence it is no surprise that the number of children living in lone-parent households – nine out of ten of the parents are single mothers – in Britain has grown by a quarter in the last decade. Across the UK, roughly one-quarter of families with dependent children are headed by a lone parent, but the proportion is roughly double that in some deprived areas, such as inner London boroughs, and roughly half the national average in the more well-heeled commuter areas of south-east England. One study showed that a half of children of black Caribbean background are living with one parent, compared to 13 per cent of children from a white British background, and just 5 per cent of those from Indian background.8
While many children are raised happily and successfully in couples that are not married, the evidence shows unambiguously that married parents are more likely to stay together and much less likely to suffer from low incomes. The children of married parents are less likely to fail at school, turn to drink, drugs or crime, have mental health problems or become teenage parents themselves.
In Britain, more than four out of ten children are now born outside marriage, a slightly higher percentage than in the United States, where the annual total of 1.5 million babies born to unmarried women was recently passed. One survey suggested that almost half of children fro
m separated families had not seen their father at all in the last year.9
For all the panic about children, the majority of family units across Europe are childless. One in eight Europeans lives alone and nearly a half of European households are heterosexual and single-sex couples living without children. Some have seen their kids leave home while others will never have children, but with increasing life expectancies these couples are likely to spend the biggest chunk of their life in the company of their partner. There is some survey evidence to suggest that an increasing number of people will now only marry and start families when they are convinced that it will enhance their own lives. This is a massive change from earlier generations, who thought that only a life blessed with children was a fulfilled one.
The rapid societal changes driven by changes in family structure have made the socio-economic classifications, so loved by statisticians, almost redundant. Dividing people according to the nature of work (managerial, intermediate, semi-routine, unemployed, etc.) of the head of household now looks rather out of date. As a result, several private-sector companies have created their own so-called geodemographic systems for categorizing people and the areas in which they live. Such systems typically have as many as fifty categories.10
It seems that societies, individuals and policy makers are finding it hard to come to terms with the consequences of a rapidly changing definition of ‘family’, which is increasingly flexible with ever more diverse constituent parts. But is it any worse than before? The tip of the iceberg is delinquent children who are drug-taking criminals, forming gangs to terrorize estates, but are the apparently more widespread problems of alcohol, smoking, promiscuity, anti-social behaviour and school attendance having much effect? Solutions are not readily available, but many feel that the government’s policies related to social cohesion are going in the wrong direction: people see them chipping away at society’s structures when they would rather see them being reinforced and rebuilt.