Camilla Cavendish - Extra Time - 10 Lessons for an Ageing Society - How to Live Longer and Live Better

American women also become mothers earlier than in any other OECD country: at an average age of 26, compared with 28 in the UK, and 31 in Italy. Only 14 per cent of US women remain childless, compared to 18 per cent in the UK and 23 per cent in Germany. 24

There is a dark side. America has been lagging behind other rich countries in life expectancy, partly because its high rates of obesity mean it has failed to combat deaths from stroke. But now, US life expectancy at birth has dropped for three years in a row, the first drop since the AIDS/HIV epidemic, partly because of what the Princeton professors Case and Deaton have dubbed ‘deaths of despair’ 25– from suicide, alcohol and opioids. 26Poverty and inequality pose real challenges.

In 2017, America also hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, of 1.76. 27What is not clear is whether this is a post-crisis blip or a new direction. The fertility rate of Mexicans in America dropped by a third between 2006 and 2013, partly because of the financial squeeze – and it hasn’t yet recovered. If migrants are to keep working their magic on fertility, they need to keep coming, because second- and third-generation immigrants tend to adopt the cultures of the host country and have fewer babies. Any president who builds a wall could therefore get more than he bargained for: because population is shaping up to be a powerful geopolitical weapon.

India: Educating Rhia

Today’s Indian couples say their ideal family size is two children, according to a poll by The Economist . 28That’s smaller than the ideal family cited by Brits and Americans. Fifty years since the biologist Paul Erhlich predicted mass famine in his book The Population Bomb , India’s youthful population is growing slowly. The average woman now has just 2.3 children – fewer if she is Sikh, Jain or Christian, slightly more if she is Hindu and a bit more again if she is Muslim.

India did not need a One-Child Policy to reach this point. Although government has nudged people to have smaller families in various ways, India is a good advert for the principle that educating girls reduces the number of children they have. Especially if you accept that education comes in many forms. Birth rates have fallen where cable TV has arrived in rural areas, bringing Bollywood soap operas featuring independent childless women and chic urban mothers with small families. 29Audiences name their babies after the characters, become less tolerant of domestic violence and use contraception. India is not alone: telenovelas have had a similar effect in Brazil. 30

While India still wrestles with poverty and illiteracy, it seems that urbanisation, growing prosperity, public health and most of all education are powerful contraceptives.

Singapore: City Living

‘Having kids was important to our parents,’ one thirty-something civil servant in Singapore explained to researcher Joel Kotkin, who conducted extensive interviews with young professionals. ‘But now we tend to have a cost and benefit analysis about family. The cost is tangible, but the benefits are not.’ 31

Such chilling pragmatism resonates in many parts of Asia, especially those where property prices are high. It is no accident that Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, some of the world’s most expensive cities, have some of the lowest birth rates. The Singapore government’s ‘Marriage and Parenthood Package’ offers substantial bonuses to couples who have children. But it’s not working too well. Many ambitious youngsters seem more focused on their careers: a third of graduates aged 30 to 34 years old are single in Singapore, and the birth rate is 1.2. 32

These modern workers don’t seem to worry that no one will look after them in old age. Across Asia, the traditional model of close-knit families is breaking down. Social networks are increasingly made up of friends, not relatives: reinforcing the notion that childlessness is normal.

Europe: Waiting for Mr Right?

‘Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration,’ tweeted Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and fugitive from justice, in 2017. ‘EU birthrate = 1.6,’ he went on. ‘Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni [the leaders of Germany, Britain, France and Italy at the time] all childless.’

This was a neat summary of Europe’s plight. And nowhere does it apply more strongly than in Italy, which most of us still associate with large Catholic families. The country of ‘ amore ’ now has the lowest birth rate in Europe. This is partly a consequence of youth unemployment. The long, grim recession since the financial crash of 2008 has seen many Italians travel abroad to find jobs, and others fearing they can’t afford children.

The average Italian woman would still like two or more children. 33But she doesn’t have her first child until 31 – older than anywhere else in the EU. 34One reason may be that two-thirds of Italian men under 35 are still living with their parents, in contrast to most young women. 35Politicians have dubbed these Mama’s boys ‘ bamboccioni ’ (‘big babies’) who won’t grow up. Political commentator Antonio Politi has claimed that women are being deterred from raising families by men who are neither fulfilling their roles as breadwinners, nor stepping up to fatherhood.

Attempts to warn women not to leave it too late have backfired spectacularly. When Italy’s health minister Beatrice Lorenzin organised a national Fertility Day, with talks up and down the country, she was met with outraged counter-demonstrations. Women marched through the streets carrying placards reading ‘ siamo in attesa’ : 36a play on the Italian for ‘we’re expecting’, which also translates as ‘we’re waiting’. Waiting for jobs, waiting for affordable childcare, and waiting for equality. Many Italian women still lose their jobs when they get pregnant; one in four is sacked within a year of having her first child. 37Romance is not entirely dead, but the birth rate is in trouble when women need to work but don’t have equality.

Germany has similarly high rates of childlessness to Italy. But in Europe’s prosperous heart, this has less to do with money worries. ‘In the days of “ Kinder, Küche, Kirche ” [“Children, Kitchen, Church”] it was natural to have children,’ I’m told by Dr Jan Kessler, a paediatrician in Munich. ‘But that’s old-fashioned to a generation which wants to keep its options open. They want to study; they want a good career; it’s never really a good time to have a child.’

Women are enjoying success, and don’t always want to deal with old-fashioned views of motherhood. ‘No one minds me having a career,’ one married academic told me. ‘But I would get a lot of flak if I left a child in a crèche.’ Some German women fear being labelled as Rabenmütter , ‘raven mothers’, if they dare to combine work and motherhood. This appalling image, of ravens as carrion-eaters who neglect their young, seems to weigh heavily on some women, who are in any case not certain whether they want children.

The German government gives generous parental leave and has massively expanded day care. It now spends almost three times as much on benefits to families as it spends on defence. 38(The UK spends about 1.3 times more. 39) The reforms were led by Ursula von der Leyen, a government minister and mother of seven, who subsidised paternity leave and declared that men should be responsible for half of the childcare. And the birth rate has nudged up a little, with the help of immigrants. To keep pace, the Federal Statistical Office has estimated that the country would need half a million immigrants every year until 2040. That seems unlikely, given the backlash which followed Angela Merkel’s opening the borders to around a million refugees in 2015.