When I walked out of hospital with my firstborn, the feeling I remember most vividly is incredulity. In a world in which you need a permit to go fishing or trim a big tree, I was being sent home to nurture a tiny human, equipped with a handful of paperwork and a wave from the nurse. I wouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery in my exhausted state, and yet this beautiful little creature relied upon me to survive. How was this allowed?
The other feeling was terror. You walk into hospital as an adult with full agency, and depart with monumental responsibilities on your shoulders. There are the ones you expect – feeding, keeping them safe – and the ones you don’t. Cutting a newborn’s fingernails feels like keyhole surgery. These turn into bigger challenges: finding the money for exorbitant childcare fees, paying skyrocketing housing costs, juggling care with the work required to pay for it all. One can love one’s children to the moon and back, and still be daunted by the challenges of parenthood.
Which is among the reasons why Australians are having fewer children. As our fertility series reports, the expected rate of births per Australian woman has fallen to a record low of 1.48. It’s an important issue to explore as the immigration debate takes off because a birth rate of 2.1 is required if we are to replace the population without migration. As Matt Wade points out in this piece, lower fertility means fewer workers entering the labour force over time, with consequences for the tax base needed to support an ageing population.
Our exclusive Resolve Political Monitor polling found potential parents are being put off by the cost of raising children, housing affordability and worries about the world’s future. Big families are becoming rarer, and single-child families are becoming more common.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why women don’t have children. Some wanted them desperately, but circumstances got in the way – medical issues, the financial hurdles of IVF, or the complications of life and timing. In a piece in Good Weekend magazine, writer Katrina Strickland tells the story of those who found themselves childless, often as “the result of not one big decision but dozens of little ones, from how they responded to their own family dynamics, to the cultural conversation happening as they came of age, to the partners they rejected and those who rejected them”.
It is a beautiful, personal piece that touches on Katrina’s own yearning for a baby. I particularly loved her recollection of a conversation with Barbara Tucker, the widow of the late artist Albert Tucker, about her IVF journey. “Oh don’t worry love, you get over it,” Barbara told her. “The sadness goes, it just goes.” And, writes Katrina, “Guess what? She was right.”
Some women make an active choice not to have children; they consider themselves child-free, rather than childless. Journalist Bronte Gossling spent weeks speaking to women who had made this decision, and they told her that they’d mulled over every possible scenario with and without children for years, and would not be changing their minds. It was the right decision for them. Many, however, did not want to go on the record for the story because even now, people still judge them as selfish.
Others are opting to have fewer children. Those I know with big families say it’s its own particular kind of joy to grow up in a noisy tribe. But a big family increasingly feels like a luxury for the financially secure. In another of her pieces in this series, Bronte visited a family of five boys, experiencing the happy chaos. Next week, we will explore what it’s like to be an only child, while writer Kate Halfpenny – a middle child herself – will examine the thinning ranks of the middle child, and explain why the world will be worse off without them.
Keep an eye out, too, for Shane Wright’s piece on how much it costs to raise a child.
Conversations about fertility usually end up being about women. But I was interested to read in Wendy Tuohy’s piece about whether mothers are buckling under the mental load, that more Gen Z men than Gen Z women say they want to become parents. It’s known as the “cluck gap” and it says a lot about how women feel about the daunting prospect of motherhood in the modern age, and how the early onus on women to birth, feed and cut the nails of their newborn often doesn’t equalise. Fathers, the community and policy-makers can do more to help women shoulder these responsibilities.
If we want young people to have families – as long as that’s something they want for themselves – we need to consider how we can give them a hand.
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