Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was
rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high.
Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came
to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care;
generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare.
But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere.
This is a puzzle for Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family
Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute. A sociologist and demographer, she is one of Europe’s experts on how young people view
having children. In 2020 and 2021, she advised then Finnish prime
minister Sanna Marin on reinvigorating the country’s birth rate.
Across the world, fertility is declining in very different societies — conservative and liberal, big and small state, growing economies and
stagnating ones. It seems that Finland might be a forerunner,
unfortunately.”
Europe’s policy challenge, she wrote recently, is “to prevent a
[fertility] freefall as witnessed in many East Asian countries”. Yet
policies that worked last century may not work today. Some are likely to
cost huge sums without delivering the desired results.
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going
on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s
not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’
life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a
family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having
children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if
you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”
This helps to explain why it is no longer Europeans with less education
who want more children. Instead “those who are well-off in many ways — [who] have a partner, have support from their parents, are employed, are
not lonely — want to have more children . . . This is quite a new thing
in many countries, including England.”
The phenomenon inverts the theory of “uncertainty reduction”, which held that people, particularly from poorer backgrounds, had children to shore
up their lives. “[The idea was:] my career isn’t going well, my relationships are a bit here and there, but at least I have a child . . . You just don’t see that way of thinking any more. For millennials, uncertainty reduction is not to have children.”
Rotkirch also suspects that the spread of social media is playing a
role, not least by stoking political polarisation, loneliness and mental
health issues, which reduce fertility.
Stabilising birth rates may require not just top-down policies but a
societal rethink. “What would society look like if we valued
reproduction, and raising babies, not just your own, as much as
[economic] production?”
Until recently, fertility decline was driven by families having fewer
children than their parents and grandparents. Now the key dynamic is childlessness. In Finland, three-quarters of the recent decline in
fertility is attributable to people who have no children. “You see
similar trends everywhere.”
In the family barometer surveys, among Finns born in the late 1970s and
1980s, fewer than one in twenty said at the age of 25 that they didn’t
want to have children. Among those born in the late 1980s and early
1990s, that proportion rose to nearly one in four.
Nearly 40 per cent of Finnish men with low education are now childless
at the age of 45 (and probably for life): a “huge” proportion. Most have
no partners. Men are as likely as women to say they want children, but
are more likely to be childless.
But childlessness is also rising among those who are in a relationship.
Many couples are waiting too long. “People call me a lot in Finland.
[They say] ‘I’m 42, my partner has had three miscarriages and she says
she will not continue. And I understand I will never be a father. I’m
the only child of my parents, and there’s nobody left, and help me.’”
Rotkirch is wary of an emphasis on fertility treatments. Women’s
fertility drops in their late thirties and forties: society has to
adapt. “If you do everything that typical ministers of finance tell you
to do, you are 45 — you have a house and a doctorate and it’s too late.
The idealised life course is really at odds with female reproductive biology.”
Rotkirch suggests the focus now needs to be elsewhere. Many people who
want to have kids are not having kids. “It’s so funny when you meet
young people and they’re like, ‘I have so much to do, my schedule is so busy.’ They are really waiting for the time when they are not busy.
Governments should also not tell young people to have babies for the
sake of the economy. Instead, they should flip the message to reassure
young people about the future: “The economy is there for you to have a baby.”
In her 2021 policy guidelines for the Finnish government, Rotkirch wrote
that the “goal should be to restore the birth rate to 1.6 in the short
term and 1.8 in the longer term”. Instead the rate fell further — to
1.27 in 2023. Now, “given how few of the currently childless intend to
have children”, Finland could at best aim for a recovery to 1.4 by the
end of the decade.
Rotkirch is exasperated by those who think lower fertility rates should
be welcome, given climate change. “Climate change has to be combated
now, and if you look at fertility changes, they are long term.”
Nor can immigration simply fill the gap. “There are many good reasons
not to have kids, but importing Filipino workers, who leave their
children behind, is seriously not the answer.
“There are two things that politicians should not do. One is the very knee-jerk reaction: go back to some last-century policies.” This
includes restrictions on contraception and abortion, as seen in Poland
and Iran. “The other thing is just to close their eyes.”
Rotkirch’s hope is that the downsides of very low fertility rates may
become better understood. If there is one reason to think that rates
might stabilise or rebound, it is that past trends have yo-yoed
unpredictably. In one survey, 11 per cent of Finnish women said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made them less likely to have children. Perhaps
Europe could experience positive shocks in future.
Rotkirch is hopeful that homeworking may encourage couples to have
children: men are more likely to be around for childcare. Or perhaps as
AI takes hold, people will have more interest in children — because they
are no longer needed in the workforce or want to reaffirm their
humanity. “That would be very nice.”
Rotkirch is not scared by the future, but she doesn’t want to live in a society of old, lonely people. “I think it’s sad if our way of living is living alone on the screens, in the flats, not having sex, not having
stable partnerships, not having children.”
https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9401
Somebody did a ballpark estimation of the future of the Finnskie folk.
With present reproduction rates and life expectancies, the once mighty
nation of 5M will in a hunnred years be a people of 1.5M incels. That's
how fast it goes.
To Kalergi or not to Kalergi? That is the PerSu question.
--
"And off they went, from here to there,
The bear, the bear, and the maiden fair"
-- Traditional
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