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Joanna Gray
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
“We have no idea why population growth has gone into reverse. This is perhaps the greatest sociological mystery of our time,” claimed the normally wise Louise Perry in the Spectator recently. The rest of the article was eminently sensible and offered a clear examination of the perils to society of falling birth rates.
The UK’s replacement rate (fertility needed for population stability) is around 2.08 to 2.1 children per woman, but the current Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is approximately 1.44. But there is nothing at all mysterious about why women have stopped having babies in the UK: mortgages and morality account for most of it.
Firstly mortgages. It’s a well understood case that first-time buyers in the UK are now aged approximately 33 years compared with 24–25 in the 1970s. It used to be the case in the 1970s–90s that an average house price in the UK was three to four times a single person’s salary – it is now seven to eight times higher, requiring two working incomes in order to buy a house. This shift also coincided with the abandonment of multi-generational living and increased rent. Being unable to set up a family household until you are well into your 30s has obvious impacts on the age at which women can even begin to contemplate having children.
The second M: morality. The shift in morality around motherhood is altogether a more pernicious reason for declining birth-rates. Since the 1960s motherhood has been depicted as bad thing for mothers particularly, the planet generally and of scant relevance to the child.
Quite how this has escaped Louise Perry’s notice is surprising, as the evidence is everywhere. Where to begin? Cyril Connolly’s 1938 line “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” 1970s feminist Shulamith Firestone describing pregnancy as “barbaric”, Germaine Greer calling the family a “sick organism” with a mother at its “dead heart”... The idea that motherhood was an oppressive burden, that mothers were to be laughed at and pitied, that everyone, mothers, fathers and their babies, would be better off with the babies in nurseries, took terrible hold on the collective consciousness. Which politician would dream of saying today as Lincoln did, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother”?
Where once motherhood was, perhaps, overly idealised, it is now seen as something that can be easily avoided, or attempted only while also conducting a successful career. Mothering and parenting more widely has been entirely devalued as having negligible influence over a child’s life, with children instead being viewed as tabula rasa, entirely at the mercy of mental health conditions or big tech giants.
Most books published about mothers after the 1960s generally have them as psychopaths – Oranges are Not the Only Fruit or Motherwell for instance, and depictions of being a mother are almost entirely negative: any work by Rachel Cusk or The Motherload by Sarah Hoover. When motherhood is being positively considered by the publishing industry, it’s invariably in the format of manuals that suggest early parenting is going to be one long nightmare of sleepless nights and a slog to stop them becoming a depressed or unmanageable teenager. How I long for more contemporary literature that depicts mothers and the entwined joy of childhood as beautifully and honestly as Laurie Lee does in Cider with Rosie. His passage brings tears to my eyes every time I read it:
Though she tortured our patience and exhausted our nerves, she was all the time, building up around us, by the unconscious revelations of her loves, an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we never recognised it then, yet so true that we never forgot it. Nothing now that I ever see that has the edge of gold around it – the change of a season, a jewelled bird in a bush, the eyes of orchids, water in the evening, a thistle, a picture, a poem – but my pleasure pays some brief duty to her. She tried me at times to the top of my bent. But I absorbed from birth, as now I know, the whole earth through her jaunty spirit.
How are mothers depicted today? Lily Allen blithely discusses her “four or five” abortions on a BBC podcast, former child star Miley Cyrus says she refuses to bring children into a damaged planet and a significant portion of the anti-immigrant conversation is condemnatory about the larger families that certain groups have.
For those of us who have made the ‘brave’ decision to have children, it is a social death to let anyone know how much we love being a mother, how it is quite the most wonderful thing ever undertaken, how our children thrill us. When my children were younger I went to a fancy drinks party and an imposing man of business asked me what I did. I said I cared for my then two young babies. He drank his drink dry, said “Oh, I’m sorry,” and walked off. No, instead, mothers have to pretend that it’s all a terrible burden, a bore, and something that can be got through only with bucket loads of white wine. Remember those awful books, Why Mummy Drinks? The Scummy Mummies are still doing the rounds, enjoying a regional theatre tour in 2026.
Until the vibes change and motherhood again is presented as a deeply pleasurable and meaningful experience, young women and men will continue to choose the gym and lie-ins over the deep joy of creating new life. Shame.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
