Why some women don’t want to have kids in their 20s, or ever.
UK fertility rates have been declining significantly over the last couple of decades; many women have opted out of having children in their 20s and have delayed motherhood.
The ONS 2025 report found the decline is caused by the UK’s ageing population. This means people are now living longer, having fewer children and outnumbering younger people.
However, the decline in the UK is not unique compared to countries like South Korea, Japan, China, Italy, and Spain. From a global perspective, the main causes for fertility decline are linked to better accessibility to contraception, more women in higher education and economic factors.
Dr Paula Sheppard, a lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, wrote that the UK phenomenon is caused by people starting to have families later in life. Some of the factors boil down to the “shift in gender roles and family dynamics,” as well as increased opportunities for women in education and career.
Dr Sheppard researches graduates and non-graduate women to investigate why they delay parenthood.
She found most non-graduates were not interested in owning homes and paying mortgages, but wanted to live in a ‘good’ house with lots of space for their children. However, they also wanted some form of stability within their relationship, ensuring their partner’s commitments.
Whereas the graduate women preferred to have a co-parent ‘hands-on’ dad because they wished to have stability in their career progression. Dr Sheppard also discovered that graduate men wished to have more flexible working arrangements to support their partners.
The Careers After Babies report by That Works for Me found that “85% of women leave the full-time workforce within three years of having children. 19% leave the workforce altogether.” They also found that most workplaces did not offer flexibility and concluded that mothers working full-time is ‘not desirable’.
“The most important thing to women was not losing their place in the career ladder,” Dr Sheppard said. “Women want their partners to be hands-on dads because we don’t have extended families around us.”
“We live in a society of very isolated nuclear families”
DR Paula Sheppard
Some parents now are feeling anxious, overwhelmed and lonely. The persistent feelings are attributed to expensive childcare, lack of flexibility for working hours, isolation from support networks and the political or climate looming dangers.
Dr Sheppard states the most defining feature about our human species is our initiative to help each other and live within larger communities. The idea that it takes a village to raise a child is still prevalent and is still very much needed. However, since Western modernisation, we have become smaller.
A study by Gül Deniz Salali on the BaYaka community in the Republic of Congo witnessed elderly women and children caring for babies. Deniz Salali highlighted how a BaYaka child knew more about how to ‘parent’ than she did with her newborn baby, as well as stating the UK’s midwives and nurses are sometimes inconsistent and outdated.
“I spent my childhood and early adulthood learning subjects like math, physics, and literature—what my societies valued most. My first months of motherhood were emotionally overwhelming because of the steep learning curve I had to scale,” Salal said.
“People are realising kids are not all fun and are expensive in an already expensive world.”
In a survey I conducted with a group of University of the Arts London students, between the ages of 18-29, they stated their views on parenthood and why they wish to delay it.
Some said they are not attracted by the image of motherhood because they enjoy their freedom, and cannot make the long-term commitment of caring for a child. Others have said they want a child but are uncertain about their future.
From the survey, more than half have said they are delaying parenthood because of financial insecurity and wish to pursue personal goals. One person anonymously wrote on their reasons for delaying: “The financial burden, unfair distribution of domestic labour, not knowing what I want and what society wants from me.”
Professor Wendy Sigle of Gender and Family Studies, from the London School of Economics, believes the reason why people are straying away from parenthood is because of the uncertainties within their lives.
“People are concerned about the world their children will grow up in and inherit,” she said. “A child is a permanent commitment. And if your life looks like things could go very bad, very quickly, it might be difficult to convince yourself that now is the right time to have children.”
She added the internalised idea that being a great, responsible parent, to be settled down at the right time is a façade. The society we live in now is set up in a way that we will never be ready.
Professor Sigle believes we should be asking questions to certain organisations about why some of them are making it harder to raise children. She also highlighted that we shouldn’t be blaming women for not having children and instead focus on what kind of society we want to live in.
“When we make fertility rates a concern, it opens up the space for these kinds of right-violating eugenic discourses to gain credibility, and that really worries me,” she said.
Similarly, Dr Sheppard was also concerned about traditional values returning and what that could mean for women if they are out of the workplace.
She believes the decline is not a crisis we should be concerned with, and if there are some countries that are facing a decline, like South Korea, then they should open their borders to allow other people to contribute to their economy.
Her argument was based on the principle that with more than eight billion people living on the planet, we are not “running out” of people.
Featured image by Gregor Ritter via Pixabay.