‘Pope Francis praised Indonesians on Wednesday for their large families and suggested that people in other countries are choosing to have pets rather than bring up children.’
Reuters News Agency
With a fertility rate of just 1.3 births per woman in Italy, perhaps it's understandable that the Pope should ask last week whether people value pets more than children.
Many people would see falling birth rates as a benefit, particularly as regards our human impact on the environment; but it is the pace of changing demographics which is causing so much of the pressure on western society. From an economic perspective we should not be surprised that the political and business approach to migration is ambivalent, to say the least, as the number of our young descendants reduces so rapidly.
However, falling rates of fertility also reflect a society which is becoming steadily more individualistic (although the proportion of people living alone has been broadly stable), and perhaps that's the reason why the Pope is expressing concern. Some might say that a Church which requires its priests to abstain from marriage is not well placed to comment on family formation: but for centuries Roman Catholics have encouraged their followers to look ahead to generations to come, and they were significantly challenged by the arrival of contraception in the late 20th century.
Individualist society is, however, a well-embedded feature of modern life. The very fact that births outside wedlock now form the majority in the United Kingdom speaks powerfully of social instability, and housing demand continues to be a major issue: the cost of living, particularly housing, is a massively important issue.
Many young people have trouble affording to live anywhere (but particularly in London), let alone raise a family. The Office for National Statistics estimates that 4.9m non-dependent young people lived in the parental home in 2021, a rise of 14.7% over 2011, with the biggest increase among 25-29 year olds. A twenty-year population rise of 8m, without proper infrastructure planning to take account of this, is therefore very important.
Meanwhile the gap between generations continues to increase: those children who are born arrive later in life, and the concept of the extended family is weakening as older folk rely on social care rather than family support.
Contraception may have enabled this change, but gender rebalancing and the priority placed on the need to transit from higher education to the workplace carry much of the responsibility for this change.
I am a passionate advocate for gender equality, having always seen the concept of male headship as a form of elitism which has no part in modern life, let alone in the church. Indeed, it is my belief that there is no gender in heaven: why else would Jesus have answered the Sadducees’ question on the status of marriage relationships after death as he did?
But modern societies have to find a way of bringing forward their own new generations as effectively as those societies which denigrate women; for otherwise the essence of gender neutrality will indeed be short-lived. The distress being imposed currently on the female population of Afghanistan should be a powerful warning to all those who wish to see progressive liberalisation building into the future.
However, the pressure we place on young people to require them to work first, and only think about family formation when they have the resources to do so, is also very short-sighted.
The human fertility timespan does not lengthen to match the demands of the workplace, and to despatch young adults from higher education with a £50,000 student debt burden hanging over them is a substantial deterrent to family formation. We must place more priority on empowering young people, not only with life skills but also with access to assets rather than a mountain of debt.
Of course, technology doesn't help either. Human relationships require direct companionship in order to flourish, not just social media and tapping away at mobile phones and tablets.
So, maybe the Pope does have a point — but not so much with his focus on pets, but to think seriously, at both personal and political levels, about the importance of family formation.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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