I’m 28 and earn more than £60,000 – but I still can’t afford to have children

I am from a comfortable middle-class family, I’m Oxford educated with a career as a political researcher, and a good salary of more than £60,000.

But at the age of 28, in the prime of my childbearing years, I am worried that I won’t be able to afford to have children in the timeframe that my biology demands.

And I am not alone. Almost every woman in my friendship groups feels this same pessimism.

Why do successful young women like me feel that motherhood is out of reach?

My situation is not unusual. I did well at school and went on to study at the University of Bristol. From there I went on to do a Masters at Oxford, and took on the £60,000 worth of debt that comes with studying.

I then moved to London, where I find myself in one of the top social brackets for those considered to be “doing well”. 

It seems natural that I would be thinking about moving onto the next stage of my life and having children.

This would certainly fit into what I envisioned for myself growing up, and what my parents and the generation before me did. I thought I would get to my mid-20s, settle down and have kids.

But for many of us, this is just not how things are panning out. The reality is that for the foreseeable future I simply cannot afford to have children.

I live in a rented flat for which I pay an extraordinary amount, and this, coupled with the rising cost of living, leaves me with almost no ability to save.

Despite earning generally well above my peers, it doesn’t go far – even though I don’t live a luxurious lifestyle. It certainly doesn’t stretch far enough to fund having a baby. Providing a stable home for a child is completely out of the question, when you move from rented flat to rented flat every couple of years at the whim of whichever landlord who owns the property.

Like many young people, it will be years before I’ll be in a financial position to buy my own home, and there is simply no way I could cover the costs involved in providing all the paraphernalia that comes with having a baby.

Then there is the issue of childcare, which everyone knows is monumentally expensive. 

Given the option, I would prefer not to work if I have children and be a stay-at-home mum for the first five years at least. But there is no way I could afford to do that and neither could any of my friends.

Instead, I would have to outsource my parenting to an underpaid nursery worker and then work like a dog to fund it. 

By contrast, at my age my mother had already given birth to two children and my father provided for us. Of course, with that came some financial struggles, but they made it work. My mother’s choice to stay at home and look after us would be considered a wasted opportunity by many liberal feminists, when in fact it is the opposite.

But there is also a culture of risk aversion among younger women like me. There is a feeling that everything has to be completely perfect. That you can’t have a baby until you can afford all the Mini Boden and Montessori schools, rather than viewing starting a family as a natural process you can get on with.

Liberal feminism has encouraged women to think we can have it all. We can’t. Very few people are honest about the fact that when you have a baby, something has got to give.

So if we are to break this cycle of younger women like me viewing motherhood as an untenable option, we need change.

An increase in affordable housing would be a good place to start. We also need a government that values the institution of the family. Mothers are worth more than their contribution to the economy. The solution to the birth crisis is not just to get women to have babies, and then throw money at them to pay for someone else to look after them. The state is a terrible parent. The current Government is not listening to what ordinary women like me actually want.

A better approach would be for the Government to introduce policies that allow parents, if they so choose, to remain at home and look after their own children. A Government which incentivises couples to start families and discourages the risk aversion which has arisen among young people.

If we want to tackle the birth rate crisis, we need a serious culture change in how society views having children. Fertility must be seen as a public good, not a private luxury. But fundamentally, our low birth rate is not the consequence of economic policies; it is a much deeper, cultural crisis.

As told to Sanchez Manning