ANALYSIS: AS RECENTLY as the early 1970s, women in Ireland had an average of four children, about double today's number. Those were the days when 7.5 per cent of married women were working, the influence of the Catholic Church was strong, and pronatalist attitudes were the order of the day.
All this began to change with Ireland’s entry to the European Community in 1973 and the removal of the marriage bar, under which women had to leave their jobs when they got married. Legislation for equal pay, employment opportunity and contraception in the mid- to late 1970s helped spur the increase in the participation by married women in the labour force. This rose systematically at every census, reaching 54 per cent in 2009 – and 73 per cent among women in the childbearing age group.
The Central Statistics Office predicts the downward trend in the average number of children is likely to prevail – although we have seen a recent blip in an upward direction – and says Ireland could reach the European norm of 1.5 children per woman. This is significantly less than the population replacement level of 2.1. Several European countries, including Italy, Germany, Hungary and Poland, have lower rates of about 1.3, considered “lowest low” in demographic terms.
One might ask why this issue is important. The simple answer is if we do not have enough children, we won’t have enough workers to pay for the health services and pensions which will be needed by our increasingly ageing population. While Ireland is not faced with this problem now, it is likely to be an issue down the road and something we would be wise to consider now in terms of our social policies and our goals as a society.
However, the falling birth rate is also a symptom of other problems and issues revealed by research. People are experiencing constraints in family formation and these are leading to lesser wellbeing. Our recent study, Attitudes to Family Formation in Ireland, involving 1,400 men and women in the childbearing age group, revealed significant discrepancies between people's "ideal", "expected" and "actual" number of children.
While on average people would ideally like to have 2.73 children, they only expect to have an average 2.41. Yet the actual number they are having is about two. A widening gap between desired and actual fertility is a phenomenon observed cross-culturally.
OECD researchers Anna D’Addio and Marco Mira d’Ercole conclude this discrepancy reflects the existence of constraints that prevent women from achieving their preferred family size. These constraints were found in our Irish study to include a lack of affordable childcare, inadequate availability of flexible working conditions, and economic constraints, as well as a fear among women that men would not be likely to share childrearing and housework and that they would have to choose between their career and being a mother.
The tension between increased opportunities for education and work, and the pull to form relationships and families, are clearly exacerbated most by the limited social policies in the area of childcare.
When Ireland had the resources during the Celtic Tiger years to make a commitment to provide childcare at national level, the government chose instead to increase child benefit. Hence we do not have the infrastructure to provide the kind of
childcare that helps support women’s employment and childbearing in countries such as France and Denmark – both of which have kept women’s employment high while maintaining a healthy birth rate.
Irish people are increasingly postponing forming the stable relationships that would lead to having children until women are in their mid- to late 30s, when the window of opportunity is smaller for childbearing. Since men do not have the same biological clock, the synchronisation between men and women’s timeframes is often far from optimal.
Moreover, despite the fact that men welcome women’s economic independence and financial contribution, there is at the same time some ambivalence towards women’s increased success in the world of work. Women perceive this and, not surprisingly, it further contributes to some strain in male/female relations, particularly when women are at a crisis point of having to find a partner to have a child before it is too late. As a result we are seeing an increase in the number of older single people and an increase in childless graduates. A stark finding from an analysis of the 2006 census data by Pete Lunn and Tony Fahey et al (2010) is that more than 50 per cent of female graduates of 32 are childless.
While the census tells us that more people are cohabiting or remaining single and delaying marriage, it does not tell us if these changes are leading to greater wellbeing. Our recent research found that single people have significantly lesser psychological wellbeing and greater social isolation than married and cohabiting people (with married people having the highest wellbeing) and single mothers are particularly at risk, as are well-educated older single women.
Given the increase in the proportion of single people in the population – including an increase in single mothers, and in divorced and separated people – it is likely a greater proportion of our society will become vulnerable to poorer psychological wellbeing.
Our society is changing from one previously richer in social networks, and is now characterised by greater social isolation and individualisation, particularly in urban areas. Relative psychological wellbeing should be of increasing concern to social policymakers.
These findings underscore the need for social policy to address the dilemmas faced by young people who want to start families, while at the same time fulfilling their needs for autonomy and development.
Unless society makes sharing of childrearing by both parents possible, women will continue to face dilemmas that prevent them from forming family relationships and having the number of children they desire. And society will suffer the consequences.
Dr Margret Fine-Davis is author of
Attitudes to Family Formation in Ireland
, carried out by the Social Attitude and Policy Research Group, Trinity College, Dublin and supported by the Family Support Agency