They used to be pitied, but one child families are now the majority - and evidence shows children without siblings are just as happy
(c) Ben Edmonds
They say you can’t put a price on love. All the same, estate agents Savills recently had a crack at the unthinkable and calculated the cost of having children, concluding that a couple growing into a family of four will assume the financial burden of £509,314 in the time from birth to the two children reaching 18.
Half a million quid to raise a family? There is a sweetener, though.
A one-child family can manage on well under half of that; coming in at £172,238. Comparing babies with cash might be crude, but anyone who says that money doesn’t matter has never had to worry about it. As the cost of living soars, Britain’s birth rate is plunging.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, only children were pitied or pilloried - or both. The concept of a one-child family was seen as being somehow unacceptable or incomplete.
China’s strict one-child policy was viewed as positively cruel, an approach Britain would never align itself with.
But look how things have changed. I write as the mother of an only child myself: 45 with one eight-year-old daughter, it’s unlikely she’ll see a sibling. Does she care? Hell, no. She has two adult servants and gets to have first choice of everything. She has also had the space to develop without envious siblings cutting her down to size. And, contrary to the received wisdom that only children are spoiled and selfish miniature adults, she is thoughtful and generous - but definitely acts her age.
Hopefully, she hasn’t heard anyone comment negatively about only children, given their ranks are swelling. I sometimes get the impression that some other parents feel a bit sad for me, the tragic old mum with her lone odd duck they know they can’t ask why I “only” have one child.
But people who think solo children deserve their pity need to reconsider. Statistically, we’re in the majority. 45 per cent of UK families with dependent children (3.7 million families) have one child, according to Office for National Statistics figures from 2023, the most recent report.
Forty-one per cent (3.4 million households) have two children, while the remaining 14 per cent (1.2 million) is made up of families with three or more children. No wonder a recent Mumsnet thread turned ugly when one member commented that having a single child is sadder than having none at all.
It seems that some people do still believe that though. My mother is an only child and horrified that I have inflicted this same penalty on my own daughter. It was far less common to have one child by choice in the 1940s, as her mother did.
We never discussed it, but I imagine my grandmother as ahead of her time. Having seen the misery of raising large numbers of children on a limited budget, she decided to do things her own way.
But my mother didn’t enjoy being an only child and went on to have three herself. I understand why she might feel empathy for my daughter but she was born 70 years earlier and they live in very different times.
The fertility rate has plummeted from 2.49 in 1946 and 2.09 in 1948, when my father and mother were born, to 1.44 today, the lowest number of births per woman since 1938.
Despite this record low, the number of women of child-bearing age is at a record high of 12 million. As the number of only children grows, the reality of British families works to erode any stigma.
Given that 1.44 rounds down to one, are most women in the UK having a single baby? Plenty of women are having none. Research from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies shows that even though two-fifths of 32-year-old women say they want children, far fewer - a quarter - are actively trying to get pregnant.
Why? Not feeling ready was the most common answer, with 44 per cent feeling this way, but cost came next, cited by 28 per cent of respondents.
Despite all this talk of money, when I survey the one-child families I know, on the surface it doesn’t seem that money keeps them from having more. Those who left it quite late might have struggled to have a first child or felt they were too old to go for a second.
Yet financial restrictions are implicit. Often it’s money that makes us wait, from hanging on until we can afford a bigger home to waiting to secure a rise or adequate seniority in the workplace. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is 33.6, up from 30.6 in 2005.
Money didn’t play an active role in our decision, but when I look at the sums today, I feel hugely sympathetic for those hoping to become parents. Everything has risen in price, from clothing to childcare.
It’s also much easier to save for one child, because you can work as many hours as you want, and your earnings haven’t yet taken the motherhood penalty plummet.
“There’ll be an increasing number of adults growing up that are only children,” says Naomi Magnus, a psychotherapist and the clinical director of North London Therapy. “Historically the narrative around the only child experience has been about what they miss out on. But the narrative could shift to what they gain, because it’s an increasing phenomenon.”
These potential gains aren’t all material: the biggest benefit we can give our daughter is time.
At bedtime, for example, no one is rushing off to another crying child. She can have both of us if she wants. Having siblings is wonderful and would be lovely for my daughter, but there’s no evidence she would grow up happier or healthier with a brother or sister. I worry about her being alone when we age, but you can’t protect your children from every difficult circumstance.
Evidence is banishing stereotypes about single children families. A large body of research shows the biggest driver of children’s happiness and stability is their parents, and being raised in a happy home - no matter how many siblings they have. It’s also not true that families with more children are happier.
A study by the London School of
Economics found that parental happiness is highest around the birth of a first child, but then - for mothers, although not significantly so for fathers - gradually decreases with the birth of subsequent children.
While the birth rate has been falling for decades, its decline has sped up over the past decade, from 1.94 in 2012 to 1.85 in 2013 and 1.58 by 2020. The very unhappy bedfellows of soaring costs and inflexible working conditions contribute.
When I wrote about having “just the one” in 2020, my concerns were more closely related to sleep, sanity and the environment than finances. I didn’t have another child because I didn’t think I could cope with a second until Percy turned three, at which point the pandemic put the brakes on any thoughts of another.
We would no doubt have fewer holidays if we had two children, but we wouldn’t be counting each missed break as something lost from our lives. I can confirm that having one child is bliss.
I have a long-running disagreement with two dear friends who, like me, are mothers in their mid-40s. They believe that babies don’t have to be expensive, I believe this pair are delusional. My friends are both very smart, so it pains me that they have not yet admitted that I am right. They both believe that having a baby doesn’t have to be expensive, even in London, because their own parents managed it on very tight budgets.
They say that the basics cost very little when children are young, and that you can share or borrow equipment and clothes, as we all did. Conveniently, they both also had secure living arrangements and grandparents on tap while their babies were young; luxuries I did not have, and lost a lot of sleep over.
My counter is that the extortionate cost of having children has nothing to do with the price of nappies, or even expensive buggies or milking equipment. You can skip the baby yoga, and the latte meet-ups. You can source every baby-rearing item you need on Vinted and Marketplace, and shave pennies and pounds off all manner of outgoings.
But you cannot beat the structural costs of having a baby, from housing to lost earnings, nor outwit rampant inflation.
So much has changed in the decade since I gave birth. No wonder more than a quarter of prospective parents say affordability is a deterrent. The Savills calculation turns on the premise that all parents will be buying a property, but home ownership, too, has plummeted.
In 1995, 57.5 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds were homeowners, falling to 39.1 per cent in 2022. For the 35-44 years age group, ownership declined from 73.1 per cent to 58.7 per cent in the same period. If only renting were a more affordable alternative.
I hope all the talk of money doesn’t put prospective parents off having children at all. If you think you want to, go for it. Society would experience other benefits if there was a shift away from our obsession with property ownership.
But I do hope that the notion of half a million quid puts cost into perspective for all those who harp on about “making do” and “we managed” and all the rest.
Once a child hits their teens and starts wanting expensive products such as smartphones and trainers, parents have decisions to make about what aspect of modern life they can afford, and what they can do without. But housing and childcare remain non-negotiable whether you have one child or 10.
It’s interesting to look at the figures, but it also turns bigger families into a kind of status symbol, showing off that you can afford three or four children. I’d like to see the conversation flipped, to focus on how wonderful it is for children to have parents who are loving and present in their lives, whatever size their family is.
FAST FACTS ONE-CHILD FAMILIES
One-child families are becoming the norm in many countries. Forty-nine per cent of all families with children in the European Union have one child.
There are now 3.7 million one-child families in the UK.
A 2010 study by researchers in Denmark found that couples are happier if they have children, but women feel happiest after having only one child.
Recent research conducted in China found that children who grow up without siblings are often more competitive and less tolerant of others, but also tend to be better at lateral thinking and are more content spending time alone.
There are now more people over the age of 65 in England and Wales than there are children below the age of 15.