And specifically, the rise of childless aged folk will, inevitably, place ever more demands on the adult social care 'system'. Unpaid geriatric care from children must save the state tens of billions, but with greater proportions of the childless reaching old age that element of unpaid care will decrease. We're already back to levels of childlessness not seen since the immediate post WW1 era when the shortage of marriage partners reduced marriage and family prospects.
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This 2021 Economist piece was bigging up the non-economic factors lying behind declining fertility rates:
and seeing this consequence:
Few old people are childless today. Those celebrating their 80th birthdays this year belong to a cohort born in 1941, among whom only 11% ended up child-free. Falling fertility and growing lifespans mean that the number of childless 80-year-olds will triple over the next two decades, according to the ons, and seems likely to rise thereafter. That will put more pressure on the care system, because old people without children are more likely to receive formal care.
This is pretty much the ultimate social and personal argument for having kids of course they will return the favour and look after you when you can no longer do it for yourself.
'You care for us when we're gaining our teeth. we'll care for you when your losing yours'
My Dad gets the following services :-
A full personal concierge service where someone handles all his dealings with the bank, the council, his GP, his dentist for him. If he needs anything doing at his house someone books a tradesman and turns up to supervise them and handles payment.
Twice a week someone with full knowledge of his specific dietary requirements does all his shopping brings it to his house and puts it away.
Personal taxi service that collects him from his living room (not merely his door) and takes him to any appointments such as the hospital and waits there for him before taking him back home.
Someone visits every day without fail to check on his welfare especially because the stubborn old sod still won't wear his frigging alert pendant, they usually do the washing up and check he's eating properly whilst they're there.
There are lots of people involved this but he can confident that everything is fully co-ordinated and is able to hand over full control of his financial affairs to someone who he can trust absolutely.
He doesn't get this because Cheshire East provide a superlative care service to their pensioners (far fucking from it from what I hear) nor is he rich.
It's because he has a family (4 kids, 13 grandkids and 15 great-grandkids) and there are millions of other families providing tens of billions of care services to other elderly people. The Q's are far from unique.
There is no possible way that the state can provide this level of care, it just doesn't have the financial resources or certainly the manpower resources to do it. The care system will collapse instantly without the care provided by families especially children.
Eventually the situation will sort itself out as the old person bulge just dies off and they shrink back to being a proper percentage of a smaller population but that is a rather brutal solution.
