‘I don’t know how you do it with three.’ I am at a child’s birthday party, working out how many Wotsits it is acceptable for me, an adult, to take. It is 10.13 a.m. and these Wotsits will be my breakfast. Something had to give in the morning routine to get my son here on time, and as usual it was daddy’s breakfast. I say my son – this one is my older son. Back at home is his four year old sister, and his new, two-week old baby brother.
It’s bad form to discuss Chinese expansionism while nibbling a Quaver
‘Pardon?’ I say. ‘Three kids, man,’ says the Other Dad, ‘we find one enough to handle’. I feign a chuckle, say that we’re doing pretty well for the first couple of weeks, and ask which of the children in the heaving birthday mass is his. Would he judge me for taking the Wotsits?
Later, I end up next to a grandmother – a lesser-spotted creature on the toddler birthday circuit. ‘Three,’ she exclaims. ‘Two were enough for us’. Again, I deflect and ask her about her own children, both grown. One lives on the other side of the country. Blessedly, I finally find an acquaintance among the shuffling adults. We catch up. The new baby is discussed. ‘Gosh, three,’ she says. ‘You’re brave.’
In the several months since baby number three was born, my wife and I have had these conversations countless times. We heard similar remarks during the pregnancy, certainly, but people seemed more restrained then. Perhaps the eventual reality of our unmanageable horde was accepted in the abstract, but no one could bring themselves to really comprehend the practicalities until it was upon them – like Northern Ireland outside the EU. But now, it’s no holds barred eyebrow raising.
Fecund millennials that we are, my wife and I know we are outliers. We’ve had three children before either of us have turned 32; our eldest was born on my 26th birthday. According to the ONS, nearly half of women born in 1989 remain childless at 30, with fertility trends for younger women suggesting only further decline. Despite 2point4children being a hit show in the 1990s, British women haven’t averaged 2.4 children since the 1930s; average completed family size is now 1.92, notably lower than the 2.1 replacement rate required for developed countries to maintain their population size. To anyone paying attention to our coming demographic collapse, this is all old hat at this point.
Controversial and globally significant trends don’t usually impinge upon kids’ birthday parties. It’s bad form to discuss Chinese expansionism while nibbling a Quaver. But, now that I am in the season of life where these parties come up every other weekend, it’s hard to escape the day-to-day impact of declining birth rates, with people reacting as if I have a third eye rather than a third child. So what is a man to do?
After some trial and error, I’ve developed a stock response, which I find really greases the wheels of inter-parental conversation. ‘I don’t how you do it with fewer than three.’ Initially, this provokes uneasy laughter. But, given that an immense sense of entitlement for commenting uninvited upon the number of children other people have has now been normalised, I help my conversation partners to relax by elaborating on my thoughts further. I tend to start with:
I couldn’t do it you know – living with the knowledge that I’d burdened just one child (who themselves probably won’t reproduce) with sole responsibility for caring for me in my incontinent old age. Odds are they’ll probably move away, living with the tortured knowledge that they’ve left me in the chrome claws of the nursing home AI bots, with the occasional visit from an underpaid care worker who barely speaks English to empty my brimming bedpan.
Alternatively, I may deploy:
I don’t know how you manage with only two. After all, what happens when they realise that you stopped at two because that’s the maximum number at which you can still just about regard yourselves as ‘a couple with children’ rather than as an actual family? Have either of your kids realised yet that you couldn’t stand having them in the house and were counting down the days until they were both at school?
If I feel we’ve really hit it off: ‘Gosh, one kid eh? How do you manage knowing you’ve accepted the bare minimum level of parental self-sacrifice and may soon have ceased to grow as a person?’ Then, if their child has joined the conversation, I’ll finish with:
We always thought we’d have just one, but just couldn’t handle how lacking in the ability to share, negotiate, and compromise our lone child was turning out to be, and how evident it is that a generation of only children are contributing to widespread social breakdown and our inability to work across ideological differences.
I have, of course, never said any of these things – not even by the Wotsit bowl. It would be incredibly rude to comment uninvited on the number of children someone has.
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