The UK faces imminent demographic collapse. Birth rates are below 1.5 children per woman, with 50% of women over thirty having no children. This fact has been fodder for those justifying annual record increases in net migration. As has the number of retirees eclipsing the number of newborns since 2020. As the indigenous population becomes an inverted pyramid, someone must pay for boomers’ pensions and staff social care. However, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt reaffirmed in last week’s Budget that the government will subsidise thirty hours per week in childcare for infants from nine months old. He celebrated this move for ensuring that “an extra 60,000 parents enter the workforce in the next four years.” But don’t be fooled: the daycare industrial complex will not reverse Britain’s demographic decline. At best, it will increase GDP at the expense of children’s quality of life.
There seems to be a uniparty consensus that state-funded wetnurses are the best way to raise children. Hunt’s predecessor, and a reported mentor to his advisors, George Osborne, has planned to nudge the last stay-at-home mum among every ten women into work since 2016. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan supported Hunt’s scheme on X. Her Labour counterpart, Shadow Secretary Bridget Phillipson, has promised to create “universal school breakfast clubs” and “graduate-led nurseries” to reduce “inequality” among under-fours. The presumptive next government anticipates children will spend so much time in institutional care, that schools will begin to teach toothbrushing and possibly even potty training, rendering parenting functionally obsolete.
It already costs the UK government £4bn to subsidise childcare before the planned age bracket expansion. Hunt intends to double that cost. But, as Miriam Cates MP points out, the average parent is unlikely to return the £6,500-a-year cost to put their child into care via tax in extra hours worked. The long-term numbers don’t add up.
The plan is also proposed despite the UK’s Department for Education annual surveys, which report that 2.8 million working mothers (60% of all mothers) with children aged 0-15 would prefer to work fewer hours to spend more time with their children. 78% of parents with children aged 0-5 want to spend more time with their children, but feel they cannot afford to. The same goes for those without children.
But during this arms race to replace Mum and Dad, is anyone in Parliament or its policy politburos asking what’s best for the children?
The problem with institutional childcare policies is that they subordinate the quality of life owed to the child to the interests of the state. Children are born inextricably dependent on the mother who gestated them and cannot rationalise why they are passed off to a nursery worker whose attention is spread thinly across 29 other children. A meta-analysis of 40 studies across 12 countries found that formal childcare disadvantages children from healthy two-parent homes, “even when provision meets internationally recognised ‘quality’ standards.”
This is because separation from their mother can engender lifelong insecure/avoidant attachment styles in children during a crucial and vulnerable stage in their development. It elevates blood cortisol levels in babies, increasing the likelihood of adolescent mental health issues. As Erica Komissar has written, severing an infant from their mother starves them of oxytocin, and causes premature amygdala activation. All these factors predispose infants raised in institutional childcare to anxiety and personality disorders, and to display more rambunctious and disruptive behaviours in school settings. These are predictors for poor physical health, substance dependence, risky sexual behaviour, poor financial outcomes, and criminal offences, according to a study which followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32.
These findings are supported by the CDC’s Kaiser Study, which found adverse childhood experiences resulted in worse mental and physical health, poor finances, fractured families, and criminal behaviour in its sample size of <17,000 adults. The United States’ Fourth National Incidence Study found children raised by their married biological parents “universally had the lowest rate” of childhood physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Inversely, a meta-analysis on educational attainment found that “a reduction in the achievement gap [came] from a two-biological-parent family and high levels of parental involvement.”
Perhaps this explains the values gap between the pre-and-post-Sexual Revolution cohorts. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely than Boomers and Gen X to support revolutionary politics—of both Leftist and reactionary varieties. In Britain today, 58-66% of voters aged 18-35 support “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections” and 45-59% support “putting the army in charge.” The daycare generation feel aggrieved by a political and economic system which deprived them of present, loving parents. Without a reason to be grateful for their civilisation, it’s no wonder they want to tear it asunder.
As the only party incapable of withdrawing from a relationship, children are entitled to protections and provisions which adults aren’t. Them Before Us founder Katy Faust has written that children have “a right to be conceived and brought up in conditions most conducive to their flourishing.” Parents should act in such a way that, could their child have chosen, they would have picked to be born to them. This requires that parents be present, rather than outsource their responsibilities to a professional managerial class. Parents should make sacrifices to ensure the child’s health and happiness, not force the child to make sacrifices to ensure the parents’ personal freedom.
Institutional child care neither serves the interest of the mother, who would rather be at home, nor the child, whose development is impaired through no fault of their own. So whose interests does it serve?
Childcare policies are premised on the belief that the primary purpose of human beings is not to beget and belong to families, but to produce abundant wealth. This is betrayed by economists stigmatising stay-at-home mothers as “economically inactive” on the grounds that their activities fall outside the remit of measurable market interest. A recent Economist article on “The Motherhood Penalty” proposed that “policymakers [who] are seeking ways to get mothers back to work” should subsidise infant daycare. Women’s preference to take care of their vulnerable newborns is pathologised as an impediment to perpetual growth and the voices of stay-at-home mothers are precluded from policy debates.
The burden of early infant care falls unilaterally on mothers, and they should by no means be left to do it unaided. But state childcare policy—whether subsidised by taxes or vouchers—regards motherhood as a temporary impediment to women’s total workforce enrollment, and aims at its eradication.
Furthermore, as Scandinavia has shown, institutional childcare does not lead to long-term reversals of declining native birthrates. It only accelerates the ratcheting effect of the commodification of every sphere of life to register on a GDP graph. It ossifies the two-income-trap, which makes it punitively expensive for my generation to start families. In the UK, young people have been estranged from their familial support networks: concentrating opportunities in cities, requiring that savings be spent on rent to relocate for work, and elongating university education into years of peak fertility.
There exists a perverse incentive to do this in democratic systems: as economic growth and productivity stagnate, a government might look to commodify the domestic sphere to fudge the numbers ahead of the next election. Mothers, students, and even infants are conscripted into the economy, to keep growth going and unemployment figures looking low. However unintentionally, this positions the government as the enabling condition of the family, and inverts the relationship between the state and the voters it purports to serve. The state’s mismanagement and scaling ever-upward of the economy has created this problem. More managerial solutions aren’t the answer.
Aiming at total workforce conscription will liquidate sex differences, discourage parenthood, and render us all fungible unisex consumer units—buying substitutes for meaning rather than making it ourselves. The family is the core source of virtuous purpose in most people’s lives. As Adam Smith suggested, this sphere of life must be insulated from interference by market interests. It protects its members from the acidic forces of amoral commodification and ideological corruption. It was, and should be, considered the primary unit of communal, civic, and economic engagement. This sentiment is why Ireland rightly voted against changing its constitution last week, which recognises “the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society.” Should the UK leave the ECHR, a declaration for dependents should be made in the British Bill of Rights: ensuring that policy is made with the well-being of children, not the state’s bottom line, in mind.
For pro-natalist policy reform, the UK should look to Hungary. It was the only European country whose marriage rate rose during the COVID pandemic; doubling in a decade, to the highest in Europe. Couples marrying before the bride’s 41st birthday receive a loan of €30,000, which is written off after their third child. Mothers under 30 with at least four children receive a lifelong exemption from income tax. This has produced a <0.2 increase in its birth rate since 2010—a reversal of trends in other European nations, and the UK.
Institutional childcare is a materialistic policy that makes Marxists gleeful at the misanthropic prospect of atomising the nuclear family. The daycare industrial complex won’t increase birth rates either, manufacturing consent for our continued and increasing reliance on imported foreign labour. Automation, innovation, and more babies come with fewer economic costs and unwanted cultural conflicts than mass immigration. The government must change its heuristic for what matters to most people, and make single-provider households the viable majority again. They can start by scrapping the Chancellor’s planned expansion of daycare, to ensure children can be raised by parents who love them.
The Daycare Industrial Complex Won’t Prevent Demographic Collapse
Photo by Matiinu Ramadhan on Unsplash
The UK faces imminent demographic collapse. Birth rates are below 1.5 children per woman, with 50% of women over thirty having no children. This fact has been fodder for those justifying annual record increases in net migration. As has the number of retirees eclipsing the number of newborns since 2020. As the indigenous population becomes an inverted pyramid, someone must pay for boomers’ pensions and staff social care. However, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt reaffirmed in last week’s Budget that the government will subsidise thirty hours per week in childcare for infants from nine months old. He celebrated this move for ensuring that “an extra 60,000 parents enter the workforce in the next four years.” But don’t be fooled: the daycare industrial complex will not reverse Britain’s demographic decline. At best, it will increase GDP at the expense of children’s quality of life.
There seems to be a uniparty consensus that state-funded wetnurses are the best way to raise children. Hunt’s predecessor, and a reported mentor to his advisors, George Osborne, has planned to nudge the last stay-at-home mum among every ten women into work since 2016. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan supported Hunt’s scheme on X. Her Labour counterpart, Shadow Secretary Bridget Phillipson, has promised to create “universal school breakfast clubs” and “graduate-led nurseries” to reduce “inequality” among under-fours. The presumptive next government anticipates children will spend so much time in institutional care, that schools will begin to teach toothbrushing and possibly even potty training, rendering parenting functionally obsolete.
It already costs the UK government £4bn to subsidise childcare before the planned age bracket expansion. Hunt intends to double that cost. But, as Miriam Cates MP points out, the average parent is unlikely to return the £6,500-a-year cost to put their child into care via tax in extra hours worked. The long-term numbers don’t add up.
The plan is also proposed despite the UK’s Department for Education annual surveys, which report that 2.8 million working mothers (60% of all mothers) with children aged 0-15 would prefer to work fewer hours to spend more time with their children. 78% of parents with children aged 0-5 want to spend more time with their children, but feel they cannot afford to. The same goes for those without children.
But during this arms race to replace Mum and Dad, is anyone in Parliament or its policy politburos asking what’s best for the children?
The problem with institutional childcare policies is that they subordinate the quality of life owed to the child to the interests of the state. Children are born inextricably dependent on the mother who gestated them and cannot rationalise why they are passed off to a nursery worker whose attention is spread thinly across 29 other children. A meta-analysis of 40 studies across 12 countries found that formal childcare disadvantages children from healthy two-parent homes, “even when provision meets internationally recognised ‘quality’ standards.”
This is because separation from their mother can engender lifelong insecure/avoidant attachment styles in children during a crucial and vulnerable stage in their development. It elevates blood cortisol levels in babies, increasing the likelihood of adolescent mental health issues. As Erica Komissar has written, severing an infant from their mother starves them of oxytocin, and causes premature amygdala activation. All these factors predispose infants raised in institutional childcare to anxiety and personality disorders, and to display more rambunctious and disruptive behaviours in school settings. These are predictors for poor physical health, substance dependence, risky sexual behaviour, poor financial outcomes, and criminal offences, according to a study which followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32.
These findings are supported by the CDC’s Kaiser Study, which found adverse childhood experiences resulted in worse mental and physical health, poor finances, fractured families, and criminal behaviour in its sample size of <17,000 adults. The United States’ Fourth National Incidence Study found children raised by their married biological parents “universally had the lowest rate” of childhood physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Inversely, a meta-analysis on educational attainment found that “a reduction in the achievement gap [came] from a two-biological-parent family and high levels of parental involvement.”
Perhaps this explains the values gap between the pre-and-post-Sexual Revolution cohorts. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely than Boomers and Gen X to support revolutionary politics—of both Leftist and reactionary varieties. In Britain today, 58-66% of voters aged 18-35 support “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections” and 45-59% support “putting the army in charge.” The daycare generation feel aggrieved by a political and economic system which deprived them of present, loving parents. Without a reason to be grateful for their civilisation, it’s no wonder they want to tear it asunder.
As the only party incapable of withdrawing from a relationship, children are entitled to protections and provisions which adults aren’t. Them Before Us founder Katy Faust has written that children have “a right to be conceived and brought up in conditions most conducive to their flourishing.” Parents should act in such a way that, could their child have chosen, they would have picked to be born to them. This requires that parents be present, rather than outsource their responsibilities to a professional managerial class. Parents should make sacrifices to ensure the child’s health and happiness, not force the child to make sacrifices to ensure the parents’ personal freedom.
Institutional child care neither serves the interest of the mother, who would rather be at home, nor the child, whose development is impaired through no fault of their own. So whose interests does it serve?
Childcare policies are premised on the belief that the primary purpose of human beings is not to beget and belong to families, but to produce abundant wealth. This is betrayed by economists stigmatising stay-at-home mothers as “economically inactive” on the grounds that their activities fall outside the remit of measurable market interest. A recent Economist article on “The Motherhood Penalty” proposed that “policymakers [who] are seeking ways to get mothers back to work” should subsidise infant daycare. Women’s preference to take care of their vulnerable newborns is pathologised as an impediment to perpetual growth and the voices of stay-at-home mothers are precluded from policy debates.
The burden of early infant care falls unilaterally on mothers, and they should by no means be left to do it unaided. But state childcare policy—whether subsidised by taxes or vouchers—regards motherhood as a temporary impediment to women’s total workforce enrollment, and aims at its eradication.
Furthermore, as Scandinavia has shown, institutional childcare does not lead to long-term reversals of declining native birthrates. It only accelerates the ratcheting effect of the commodification of every sphere of life to register on a GDP graph. It ossifies the two-income-trap, which makes it punitively expensive for my generation to start families. In the UK, young people have been estranged from their familial support networks: concentrating opportunities in cities, requiring that savings be spent on rent to relocate for work, and elongating university education into years of peak fertility.
There exists a perverse incentive to do this in democratic systems: as economic growth and productivity stagnate, a government might look to commodify the domestic sphere to fudge the numbers ahead of the next election. Mothers, students, and even infants are conscripted into the economy, to keep growth going and unemployment figures looking low. However unintentionally, this positions the government as the enabling condition of the family, and inverts the relationship between the state and the voters it purports to serve. The state’s mismanagement and scaling ever-upward of the economy has created this problem. More managerial solutions aren’t the answer.
Aiming at total workforce conscription will liquidate sex differences, discourage parenthood, and render us all fungible unisex consumer units—buying substitutes for meaning rather than making it ourselves. The family is the core source of virtuous purpose in most people’s lives. As Adam Smith suggested, this sphere of life must be insulated from interference by market interests. It protects its members from the acidic forces of amoral commodification and ideological corruption. It was, and should be, considered the primary unit of communal, civic, and economic engagement. This sentiment is why Ireland rightly voted against changing its constitution last week, which recognises “the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society.” Should the UK leave the ECHR, a declaration for dependents should be made in the British Bill of Rights: ensuring that policy is made with the well-being of children, not the state’s bottom line, in mind.
For pro-natalist policy reform, the UK should look to Hungary. It was the only European country whose marriage rate rose during the COVID pandemic; doubling in a decade, to the highest in Europe. Couples marrying before the bride’s 41st birthday receive a loan of €30,000, which is written off after their third child. Mothers under 30 with at least four children receive a lifelong exemption from income tax. This has produced a <0.2 increase in its birth rate since 2010—a reversal of trends in other European nations, and the UK.
Institutional childcare is a materialistic policy that makes Marxists gleeful at the misanthropic prospect of atomising the nuclear family. The daycare industrial complex won’t increase birth rates either, manufacturing consent for our continued and increasing reliance on imported foreign labour. Automation, innovation, and more babies come with fewer economic costs and unwanted cultural conflicts than mass immigration. The government must change its heuristic for what matters to most people, and make single-provider households the viable majority again. They can start by scrapping the Chancellor’s planned expansion of daycare, to ensure children can be raised by parents who love them.
READ NEXT
Jaguar: All Virtue, No Vehicle
Mazan Affair: A Trial of Moral Misery
Milei Disrupts the Cosy Consensus at the G20