How a ‘fertility gap’ is fuelling the rise of one-child families

Natalie Johnston was scrolling on Facebook a couple of years ago, when she came across a group called, “One And Done On The Fence”. Seeing it, she felt a sense of relief.

“It was nice to hear someone giving it a name,” she says.

She and her husband have a five-year-old daughter called Joanie but they knew they probably wouldn’t have a second child – not because they couldn’t, but not out of choice, either: Natalie finds it hard to imagine having the time and money for one.

“You know you’d love that baby, everyone tells you, but there’s a little teeny niggle where you think, ‘what if I put my first in that position where she can’t do the activity she wants to do because I’ve got to spread money out between two’?”

She adds: “Is it okay to say you’re only having one because they don’t fit into modern ways of parenting?”

Modern parenting, for Natalie, 35, looks like family holidays with Joanie. It looks like weekday evenings hearing about her day at school and helping her with homework. But, with demanding jobs and no family living nearby to help with childcare, it also looks like an expensive childcare jigsaw.

But ultimately, deciding whether or not to have a second is a tough decision. “I think you worry you’d regret it,” she says.

The fertility rate was 1.41 children per woman in England and Wales last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – the lowest on record for a third year running.

And the proportion of families with one child has grown since the turn of the century.

They made up 44% of all families with dependent children in England and Wales last year, up from 42% in 2000. (Though the peak was 47% in the early 2010s, which then dipped before picking up again after Covid.)

The UK’s falling birth rate is part of what the United Nations calls a “global fertility slump”, which it puts down, in part, to money worries.

People aren’t “turning their backs on parenthood”, says the UN in a summary of its Population Fund’s State of World Population report, which surveyed people across 14 countries.

Instead it says they “are being denied the freedom to start families due to skyrocketing living costs, persistent gender inequality and deepening uncertainty about the future”.

Bridging the ‘fertility gap’

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said earlier this year that she wants “more young people to have children, if they so choose”.

She pointed to the expansion of funded childcare hours in England as a way the government was trying to recover “dashed dreams”.

Annual nursery costs for a child under two in England did fall this year for the first time in 15 years, according to the children’s charity Coram. They are now an average of £12,425, down 22% on the previous year. However they are slightly up in Scotland and Wales, at £12,468 and £15,038 respectively.

A study from University College London (UCL) last year suggested two-fifths of 32-year-olds in England want children – or more children, if they are already parents – but only one in four of them are actively trying to conceive.

Dr Paula Sheppard, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, believes parents in the West still think of having two children as “the norm”.

However, she says there is a “fertility gap” and that “for every three kids wanted… only two are born”.

“A lot of this gap is driven by… people starting families later and later in life,” she explains – often a result of education and career opportunities for women and changing gender roles.

“It becomes a whole lot more difficult to get pregnant [and] it becomes a whole lot more difficult to keep the pregnancy.”

Fewer pupils, less cash for schools

The falling birthrate is giving education policymakers a headache.

The number of pupils in England has dropped by 150,000 since 2019, and will fall by a further 400,000 by the end of the decade, according to the Education Policy Institute.

Schools are given money per pupil, so fewer pupils means less cash. Less cash, in turn, is an issue for those head teachers struggling to fund staffing and resources.

About a year ago, a post on a UK Reddit thread for teachers raised what one contributor saw as another potential impact of more only children on the education system.

The contributor wrote that they had seen a rise in “spoilt” children with “demanding behaviour due to overindulgent parenting”. These children tended to have siblings who were much older or no siblings at all, they claimed.

The idea that children without siblings may be selfish or spoiled dates back to research conducted in the late 19th century by psychologists G Stanley Hall and E W Bohannon.

“Selfishness is one of the most striking traits of the only children in families,” they wrote in their Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children. “‘The only child’ is deficient on the social side.”

But more recent studies have debunked that idea.

“Numerous studies have disproven these myths that only children are maladjusted, spoiled, and lonely,” explains Dr Adriean Mancillas, a psychologist and professor in California State University’s education department.

Only children and academic performance

Dr Mancillas has spent her career exploring family dynamics, the development of only children, and mental health intervention in schools – and says most research “consistently demonstrates advantages of being an only child, particularly in educational and academic outcomes”.

This is down, mainly, to a theory called “resource dilution”. In simple terms, she says this means parents with one child “are able to be more involved in their child’s education”.

“Children with siblings share in parents’ time, emotional support, attention, and financial resources whereas the only child does not,” says Dr Mancillas. “This singular focus of resources tends to provide academic advantages for the only child.”

She points to some research that suggests many only children did better academically when schools closed to most pupils in lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, “because of the relative availability of parental resources”.

“Resource dilution” is one of three social science theories about the consequences of being an only child, according to University College London (UCL) academics.

The second is “confluence theory”, which also suggests that only children perform better than children with siblings academically because a family’s “intellectual environment” declines as the number of children grows.

Then there is “socialisation theory” which, in contrast, argues that siblings help children learn how to share, negotiate and resolve conflict.