How to be EXTREMELY green: Don't have kids

By Ben Leapman, Home Affairs Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 6:46am BST 24/04/2007

A third of women graduates will never have children, research has concluded.

The number of highly educated women who are starting families has plummeted in the past decade, according to findings that provide the most detailed insight yet into education and fertility.

While some women are making a conscious decision not to have children, others are simply leaving it too late after taking years to build their careers, buy a home and find the right partner.
advertisement

Graduates who do become mothers are having fewer children, and later.

If the low birth rate trend continues, then the eventual rate of childlessness among graduates now aged in their twenties is likely to be even higher than a third.

The findings come from a ground-breaking study into more than 5,000 women born in 1970 and tracked throughout their lives by researchers at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, based at the Institute of Education in London.

It revealed that 40 per cent of the graduate women were childless at age 35. The researchers forecast that by the time they reach the likely end of their child-bearing years at 45, about 30 per cent will still be childless.

Of a panel of older graduate women born in 1958, only 32.7 per cent were childless at 35.

The results help to explain the low birth rate which is leading to an ageing population in Britain and much of western Europe.

Overall population decline is only being prevented by immigration and a higher birth rate among non-graduate women.

German birth rate falls to lowest in Europe


Luke Harding in Berlin
Wednesday March 15, 2006
The Guardian

The number of children born in Germany last year was the lowest since the end of the second world war, the Federal Statistical Office reported yesterday. According to provisional figures, 680,000 babies were born in 2005, down from 1.36 million in 1964.

Germany now has the lowest birth rate in Europe with 8.5 births per 1,000 inhabitants, while in Britain it is 12, France 12.7, the Netherlands 11.9 and Ireland 15.2. The figures also show falling birth rates across former communist eastern Europe and the Baltic states, including Poland (9.3), Bulgaria (9) and Latvia (8.8).

Leading economists said unless Germans started breeding again Europe's biggest nation faced the prospect of reduced growth, economic decline and an elderly shrinking population.

"We are reaching a critical point," Michael Hüther, the head of Cologne's economics institute, told Die Welt newspaper. "The number of births now determines what happens in the next decade-and-a-half to two decades. You can't revise it afterwards. The availability of human capital will get worse, and act as a brake on growth."

Article continues
He told the Guardian: "The tradition in the 1950s, 60s and even the 80s in Germany was that a mother was only a mother and looked after the children."

Last year Germany's family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, tabled proposals to encourage reluctant couples to have children. They included tax breaks of €3,000 a year for working couples, more nursery places, and a new state-funded welfare scheme that requires men to take two months off for families to get full funding. So far the changes appear to have had little impact and they have been criticised by some as a perk for the well-off.

Experts have pointed to many reasons why Germans are failing to reproduce - a conservative family culture, with women expected to stay at home; schools that finish at lunchtime; and a tax system that discriminates against working women. "I'd like to have children. But to do so now would kill off my career," Steffi Warnke, a 31-year-old PhD student at Berlin's Free University told the Guardian.

"The problem is we study in Germany for a long time. When you reach the stage you are applying for academic jobs you are 30-35. And if you do have kids you don't get much support. Germany is becoming a society of pensioners. You only have to turn on the TV to see that all the programmes are for the over-50s."

The latest federal figures show wide regional discrepancies. The highest birth rate is in former West Germany, with Wiesbaden (10.5), Frankfurt (10.2) and Bonn (10.1) topping the list. In former communist East Germany, by contrast, the birth rate is alarmingly low, with the city of Chemnitz (6.9) registering the lowest birth rate in the world. According to Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency, by 2050 Europe's population will have fallen by around 1.5%, or 7 million people.

European Birth Rate Declines
Population Growth In E.U. Has Flipped From Positive To Negative

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2003

(AP) The natural increase in Europe's population is slowing and may start a steep decline within a few decades, researchers say.

Researchers writing in the journal Science said European population growth reached a turning point in the year 2000 when the number of children dropped to a level that statistically assured there will be fewer parents in the next generation than there are in the current generation.

In effect, the authors say, the momentum for population growth in the 15-nation European Union has flipped from positive to negative and the trend could strongly influence population numbers throughout the 21st century.

"If the current fertility rate of around 1.5 births per woman persists until 2020, negative momentum will result in 88 million fewer people in 2100, if one assumes constant mortality and no net migration," the researchers say. The EU population in 2000 was about 375 million.

Brian C. O'Neill, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and a co-author of the study, said the projection is based on the age structure of the current European population which now has more adults than children.

"Age structure affects population size because it determines how many adults there will be in the future," O'Neill said in an interview. "Currently there are fewer children than adults. That can produce a declining population in the future because the number of potential parents will be smaller than the number of parents there are today."

A population decline in Europe is not assured, said O'Neill, but the decline in the number of future parents is a fact that may set in motion a drop in population.

"That is going to push the population toward decline," he said. "Whether it actually ends up in a decline will depend on other factors, particularly migration. ... The European population may not decline if migration is high enough to offset this population momentum."

The change in the traditional role of women has been a major factor in the projected decline in population, the authors said. The demands of education and career encourage many women to put off having their first child.

In the 20th century, the average age at first birth of mothers shifted sharply from the low 20s to the late 20s. As the trend toward having the first child continues to advance toward an older age it locks in a decline in natural population growth, said O'Neill.

"The implications of negative momentum are small right now, but they are going to get bigger quickly," he said. "If you have another 10 years of low fertility, that decline (by 2100) would be 25 to 40 million. If we have two decades of low fertility, then it would be another 25 to 40 million."

Hans-Peter Kohler, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has written extensively on population trends, said the paper by O'Neill and his co-authors is "a quite important study."

He said the research demonstrates that fertility in a population can be significantly affected by social trends that encourage women to delay starting a family. Although this has had a major effect on the European population, he said, it has not been a major factor in the United States.

"There is a delay in the U.S., but it is much less pronounced when compared to the Europeans," said Kohler.

O'Neill's co-authors on the study in Science were Wolfgang Lutz and Sergei Scherbov of the Vienna Institute of Demography, a part of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

leet wrote: Children cost parents lots of money in a capitalist system. Not only that, but the woman will probably take time off from work - years even - during which she will not earn any income and will even lose ground with social security benefits.

Day Care: An Office Affair
More employers should provide care for their workers’ children.

Pro or con?
Pro: Happy Parents, Kids, and Corporations

by Cliff Hahn

It’s obvious what working parents gain from on-site day-care programs: reliable, safe, and convenient care for their children. But what do the employers get out of it?

Let’s start with happier and more productive employees.

In a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, employers cite child-care issues as causing more problems than any other family-related issue in the workplace, with increases in absenteeism and tardiness reported in nine out of 10 companies. And 80% of the companies surveyed said that work days were cut short because of child-care problems.

Child care benefits the employers who sponsor it by improving employee morale, reducing turnover and absenteeism, and increasing productivity.

And pampering bottoms might just help the bottom line. A cost-benefit study conducted by Cynthia Ransom and Sandra Burud at the Union Bank in Pasadena, Calif., showed the institution’s on-site day-care program saved it $138,000 to $232,000 in annual operations costs, due to the reduction in both turnover and absenteeism.

Child-care services enable employers to gain wage savings, too. For the book Kids at Work: The Value of Employer-Sponsored On-Site Child Care Centers, authors Rachel Connelly, Deborah S. DeGraff, and Rachel A. Willis studied hundreds of employer-sponsored child-care programs and interviewed some 1,000 employees. Their research demonstrates on-site day care is not only affordable but also profitable. The researchers estimated savings in wages of $150,000 and $250,000 for just two companies that provided on-site day care.

A majority of workers were willing to pay, on average, $125 to $225 per year to subsidize on-site day care—whether or not they had young children. That’s right—even nonparents said they’d chip in, because they believed it would help raise morale and increase productivity.

"It shouldn’t be so surprising that people who work with one another for five or more years should care about one another and that that actually translates into economic behavior," says Connelly. Kids at Work, she notes, offers some models for calculating the benefits.

"Maybe your CEO or HR person can take a risk," adds Connelly. "It can be a case of, ‘If you build it, they will come.’"

Con: Get Real About What Employers Can Do
by Courtney Lee Adams

Employer-provided on-site day care won’t solve the child-care problem for working families, and in many cases is unrealistic. Let’s face a relevant fact: The real burden of caring for children falls disproportionately on women, who in the U.S. still perform twice as much child care and domestic work as men.

How many working women have employers who could consider providing such services? In the U.S., professional managerial women make up only about 8% of the female workforce, whereas 27% of women hold low-wage blue-collar jobs.

A third of all families with children have incomes not far above the federal poverty level. In New York City, single working mothers (many of them employed in the service sector) suffer the highest rates of poverty. Do we really believe their employers will take up the expense of caring for their children?

Besides, large or small, no employer should be in the business of child care, any more than it should run on-site hospitals, dental clinics, or high schools. On average, children under the age of 5 with working mothers spend 36 hours per week in some type of care. In an era when fewer Americans receive health insurance through work (only 55% now, and the numbers are declining), tying essential child-care services to employment is unrealistic, a poor strategy that doesn’t serve the interests of either working families or businesses.

Families need flexible work schedules, including longer, paid maternity leave for mothers and fathers; access to quality part-time jobs; pre-K and afterschool programs; universal health coverage; and an end to the gender discrimination that privileges men’s work and careers at the expense of women’s earning power.

Evidence suggests paid maternity leave keeps women in the workforce, increases their productivity, and ultimately contributes to the overall competitiveness of the U.S. workforce.

Publicly financed European models offer gender parity, flexible time that’s responsive to the changing needs of maturing families, and increased competitiveness for companies freed from the high 30% benefits load typically carried by U.S. businesses.

On-site day care would seem to promise the best of both worlds—employees working away at maximum productivity while their children are safe and sound—but that’s an illusion. Infants must be nursed. Sick children need to go to the doctor. Eighth-graders need supervision after school.

Nearly all parents, mothers and fathers, wish they had more time for their kids. But the answer isn’t to bring them to work.

lilbangladesh wrote: And the reason why poor people in this country have more children is a lack of reproductive education and access to birth control. Birth control is expensive! And a lot of poor people I've met are woefully ignorant about it..