What Britain’s collapsing birth rate means for grandparents

Shrinking family sizes present a looming crisis for the country’s ageing population

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The happiest years of an adult’s life do not occur during the formative period spent at university, when someone finds their calling in a career, or even when they become a parent.
According to official data, Britons reach peak happiness much later in life. Surveys carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) between 2016 and 2018 found respondents were at their happiest between the ages of 65 to 75.
While reaching retirement is undoubtedly a factor in the sudden boost of happiness, grandchildren are likely another.
Older people who help care for their grandchildren have been found to experience lower rates of depression and loneliness, including in research by the World Health Organisation.
However, such joys that were long a near-universal milestone later in life are becoming rarer. This is the inevitable consequence of Britain’s sustained fall in birth rates.
England and Wales’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.44 children per woman in 2023, the lowest on record and significantly lower than the 2.1 children per woman that is considered necessary to maintain a stable population and replace the older generation in developed countries without migration.
This means that once millennials reach old age, the number of grandchildren they have will be a third lower than 80-year-olds today.
Some of the baby boomer generation will already recognise this trend first-hand. Growing numbers of young people are increasingly opting out of parenthood, citing living costs, stressful careers and even climate change.
As families shrink, experts say new dividing lines will emerge within and across generations, impacting personal finances, care in old age and even loneliness.
Paul Morland, a demographer and senior member at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, says having younger people to advocate on behalf of relatives is crucial in a society grappling with an overburdened health system.
“In a world where there are more and more old people and fewer and fewer young people, services for the elderly will break down. Those with children [or grandchildren] to help them navigate the system will do better than those who don’t,” he says.
“If you don’t have children to put their foot down when you can’t get a doctor’s appointment or to take you to the hospital, it’s going to be pretty grim. You’re going to be at the back of the queue just because of the way these things work.”
The ONS estimates the number of people aged 85 and over will rise from 1.6m to 2.6m over the next 15 years. As a share of the population, they will grow from 2.5pc to 3.5pc.
Meanwhile, the difference between births and deaths fell to 400 in the 12 months to mid-2023, the lowest in 45 years. The number of state primary school children is expected to shrink by 205,000 by 2028, official projections show.
The UK is only one of many countries experiencing a sustained fall in birth rates. Everywhere young people are increasingly choosing to have fewer children, or not at all.
In England and Wales, the fertility rate is at the lowest level since at least 1938. However, it is still higher than in Japan where it hit a record low of 1.2 last year.
South Korea, which has the world’s lowest fertility rate, also hit another all-time low at 0.72 from 0.78 the year before.
These countries, where birth rates have been lower for longer, provide a glimpse of the UK’s future and what life will be like for elderly Britons, says Morland.
“We know that in Japan, there’s a whole industry of companies that go in to fumigate flats because people have died on their own and no one knows for months,” he says.
“It’s so common that people die with no relations, no friends, and nobody knows who they are. That is a symbol of the way we’re all going because we now have a fertility rate not much higher than Japan.”
Falling birth rates means family networks are shrinking – having cousins will become rarer, just like having grandchildren.
While no official data exists on the changing demographic of grandparenthood in the UK, some statistics offer a sense of the decline.
For one, more than nine in 10 women born in 1946 had children by the age of 46. Today, this figure has dropped to 84pc for women of the equivalent age. While subsequent cohorts are yet to hit that age, just under half of 31-year-olds last year had children, the lowest ever recorded.
This means the average number of grandchildren is projected to fall from 2020 onwards.
An 80-year-old at the start of this decade on average had 4.39 grandchildren, as they would have started their family in the 1960s when fertility rates peaked.
In contrast, a millennial born in 1990 will be 80 in 2070 and is projected to have an average of 2.9 grandchildren. If birth rates continue to sink, this number will be even lower for Gen Zs and Alphas.
Alice Goisis, a professor of demography at University College London, says: “There is research indicating more young people are planning to remain childless, which suggests that the recent decline in fertility rates at young ages isn’t just about individuals delaying parenthood until they’re older.”
Wealth advisers are already starting to see these demographic changes play out.
“In the last five years, we’re coming across more and more clients in those sorts of situations,” says Malvee Vaja, of Rathbones, the wealth manager.
“I’m either speaking to younger people who are the only grandchild on both sides, and I’m also speaking to older clients who are what is commonly referred to as Sinks or Dinks, so ‘single-income no kids’ or ‘dual-income no kids’,” she adds.
Natasha Percy-Baxter at St James’s Place says she has noticed growing numbers of clients who have millennial children on the fence about starting a family.
After helping them on to the property ladder, their focus is increasingly shifting.
“I’m starting to slowly see the next step is actually being able to fund creating a family for their children,” says Percy-Baxter. “So that could be contributing towards IVF privately as opposed to doing it with the NHS because of age restrictions or how many times you can do it.
“Beyond that, if and when they do have children, it’s being able to prove financial support around things like private school fees for their grandchildren.”
Percy-Baxter adds that clients who have children and grandchildren tend to be more careful with their finances to leave room for inheritance, with the expectation that this will one day be reciprocated.
However, demographers warn that future generations of so-called Sinks and Dinks living into old age will still need young people to staff crucial infrastructure such as care homes, as well as shops and restaurants.
“This will have massive consequences for social care,” says University College London’s Goisis. “The government will need to plan for these demographic changes and build an infrastructure that can compensate for having smaller families or perhaps not having family around.
“The loneliness epidemic is also a potential concern. We need to rethink how we organise space and cities to enable people with smaller families or no families to interact with one another to prevent loneliness.”
Oxford University’s Morland adds that while politicians can use immigration to offset such trends, this is not a sustainable method.
“I do think that if people don’t want mass immigration but they’re not prepared to have children, they’re not being consistent,” he says. “They want workers, they want people to look after them, they want the economy to function but they’re not prepared to produce the labour of future generations.”
Morland, who is about to become a grandfather for the third time, adds: “Talking about the romance of grandparenthood, I just had my grandson stay last night and took him to nursery this morning.
“It’s all wonderful and marvellous. I get very poetic about it. But if you get to [South] Korean levels where each generation is a third of the size of the one above, there’s a lot more at stake than the romance of grandparenthood.”
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