Guest Blog: Childlessness: costs, consequences and charity
Over recent decades, rates of childlessness have increased substantially in many European countries, including the UK. The percentage of British women remaining childless has risen since it was at its lowest level for women born in 1945 (9%), doubling to approximately 18% for women who are currently completing their childbearing years.
Most studies of the consequences of this phenomenon have tended to focus on the psychological effects for the individual of having no children, on levels of life satisfaction, the risk of social isolation and the potential shortfall in informal care and support. However, an important area of research recently examined in a series of journal articles[1] considers the issue of intergenerational transfers: what childless people give to their families and to society, both through transfers to next-of-kin relatives and investments in non-family networks and voluntary and charitable organisations.
Clearly, social and psychological consequences of childlessness will depend upon its causes. For example, voluntary childlessness has very different outcomes than not being able to find a partner, infertility, surviving the death of one’s children, or being socially childless through divorce. Marital status and gender tend to mediate the consequences of childlessness, as does education, income and health. Nevertheless, this group is often viewed as homogenous and, from the point of view of policy-makers, as a cause for concern.
In England, most informal care for older people is provided by spouses or adult children (Pickard et al. 2007). Current policy recognises the role of the family and explicitly relies on its continuance. A decrease in informal care provided by either of these two groups is likely to result in increases in formal care and consequently large rises in expenditure on long-term social care. Projections indicate that care by spouses will probably increase in the future, predominantly because improvements in male mortality will mean that there will be a fall in widows (ONS 2005). However, there are a number of reasons why care by children may decline in future years, including rising levels of childlessness.
Conversely, Kohli & Albertini (2009) looked at the flow of giving not in the form of care from children to parents, but considered how childlessness may affect intergenerational wealth transfers from the older to the younger generation. For obvious reasons, most of the large studies of intergenerational transfers have focused on those with children, and there is a paucity of detailed information about transfers to other family members and to friends, neighbours or charitable associations. There are also issues about levels of consumption amongst childless older people compared to those with children: are childless individuals less likely to save in their lifetime (or retirement) and therefore have less (as a proportion of lifetime wealth) to pass on to the next generation?
In ‘traditional’ family systems, childless adults usually passed on any wealth to next-of-kin – nephews, nieces or other relatives. More recently, however, evidence suggests that giving to public or semi-public welfare organisations is increasingly important amongst the childless population. And the church, traditionally the beneficiary of many of these donations, has now been joined by many other favoured institutional recipients. Many of these provide a service specifically for children or young adults, and so giving to them can be seen as a specific form of intergenerational wealth transfer and optimisation of the donation environment through policies may help to foster people’s charitable giving and civic engagement.
There is no consensus on forecasting trends in future childlessness, although it seems unlikely that there will be a dramatic decrease in levels. However, childless people are a heterogeneous group, and policies for long-term care or wealth transfers should reflect the changing demographics of our older population.
The issue of increasing levels of childlessness raises more questions than answers. And there is certainly a need for more research into the impact of childlessness in an ageing society, both for childless older people and for society at large. Looking to the future, this is an issue which policymakers must begin to engage with.
Laura Stoll, January 2010.
Researcher in Demography at the London School of Economics