Finance biggest deterrent to having children, report says

Finance biggest deterrent to having children, report says

The fears that deter young couples from starting a family have been revealed in a report published today.

The study, carried out by the Future Foundation into the reasons why Britain's birth rate has tumbled since the end of the 1960s baby boom, found financial pressures were the greatest inhibition.

It found that two-thirds of a sample of childless adults under the age of 45 said they were delaying having children until they could save enough to afford them. Half were postponing having a family until they could move to a bigger home.

The foundation said this fear was well founded because the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 was now more than £122,000.

"To a generation of potential parents inundated with debt, financial pressures will continue to be an inhibitor," it said.

However, other fears could be considered to be more self-centred. Around 50% of childless men and 40% of childless women said they were not ready to make the lifestyle changes necessary to accommodate the needs of young children.

Twenty and thirtysomethings were participating in twice as many leisure activities as 25 years ago and appeared reluctant to give them up.

The researchers found that 61% of new fathers and 56% of new mothers became less satisfied with their leisure time in the year after their first child was born.

One in five childless adults said they were delaying having a family because of a fear of crime.....continued below

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in their neighbourhood, and 11% said the world was too dangerous a place in which to raise children.

But only 7% did not want to have children because they thought they would not be a good parent.

"The findings reveal that having children is now thought of as a lifestyle choice rather than an inevitable life stage," the foundation said.

"For more and more of us, when to have children - or indeed whether to have children at all - is thought of as a choice as planned as the career we enter into and the mortgage we choose.

"We are having children later than ever before, and fewer children than any previous generation. The majority still aspire to be parents. What is changing is not human nature, but the growing weight of inhibitors to having a family."

Twenty years ago, the average woman had her first child at 25, but as career opportunities have expanded that age has risen to 29.

The foundation's findings, based on a survey of 795 adults, showed parents were taking a more "professional" attitude to bringing up children.

Averaging the time spent looking after children at different ages, parents now undertook 99 minutes of hands-on childcare a day compared with 25 minutes in 1975.

Younger parents were more anxious than the over-35s about children's wellbeing, with recent parents more inclined to use new technologies to gain reassurance.

Video links to a school or nursery were considered useful by one in three parents with children born in 2000 or after, and 40% of recent parents said they would be interested in location-tracking devices for their children.

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