The Kitchen that Used to Be Full

My grandmother had five children. My mother had three. My sister has one. I have none, and am, if I am honest, not sure I want any.

This is not a complaint, even against myself. I am a thoughtful person, I think. I have reasons. My reasons are not wrong. They are also not, on their own, the whole story.

But if you put us in a line — grandmother, mother, sister, me — and count the children in each kitchen, you get five, three, one, none. If you do the same with most of the families on most of the streets I know, the line looks about the same. The direction is the same.

There was a time when people said this was a Western thing. That some people in some parts of the world were having fewer children, and others were having many. That the balance was shifting, that one way of life was being outgrown by another.

I used to think this too. Then I read things, and talked to people who had looked at the numbers carefully, and I had to change my mind.

Iran — a country run by a religious government that has tried hard to make its people have more children — is now having fewer than it needs. Turkey, about the same. Much of North Africa, about the same. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, India — all falling. China has fallen further and faster than almost any country in history. Korea and Japan and Singapore have fallen further still. Parts of Italy and Spain will halve within a few generations if the trend holds.

Whatever is causing it, it is not a Christian thing or a Muslim thing or a Western thing or an Eastern thing. It is a human thing. It is happening, at different speeds, almost everywhere.

The researchers who study this do not agree on why. Different theories weight different things. The price of houses. The shape of modern work. The hours spent on screens. The thinning of extended family. The shift in what adulthood is felt to be for. The quiet doubt that this is a world to bring a child into. No single one of these, on its own, explains the scale. Some combination of them, together with things we have probably not yet named properly, is turning humans away from having children, in almost every civilisation that takes on the new arrangement.

We can see the conditions. We cannot yet see, cleanly, the cause.

What we can see is the shape. Five. Three. Two. None. Across the world.

Something is being decided here that nobody chose. The decisions are happening in individual kitchens, one family at a time. But the shape they make together is the shape of a species quietly becoming smaller.

The old in every country will outnumber the young. The tax and the care and the promises will not balance. The countries that have been topping up their workforces with young people from elsewhere will find that elsewhere is running out of young people too.

No civilisation we know of has come through a moment like this. We do not know what is on the other side, because no-one has been there yet.

Five. Three. Two. None. Watch the kitchens.