1.4 GREECE’S SLUMPING BIRTH RATE
The country is emerging from its economic crisis — without a new generation,
KALPAKI, GREECE— Another school year was starting, with students arriving for their first day and lining up by grade, but when one mother dropped off her firstgrader and watched him take his place, she wondered: Where are all the children?
“There were so few of them,” said Vasso Harisiadi, who had attended school in the same town. “I thought the yard would be full of kids.”
The newest class of children at Kalpaki Elementary was, instead, a reflection of Greece’s intensifying demographic troubles. For 2018, there were just 13 first-graders. A few students lived in villages where they were the only kids. A half-dozen other schools in the area had recently shuttered. More and more would-be parents were moving away or holding off on having children — because they were jobless or, like Kalpaki’s first-grade teacher, were making too little to afford it.
“At the moment, I can’t even consider kids,” said the teacher, Maria Bersou, 33, who earns $18,000 (U.S.) a year. “I can’t save money at all.”
The Greek economy no longer looms over Europe as a bailout-dependent, euro-imperilling danger, but the country is only beginning to contend with the next phase of peril: a baby bust that has raised the likelihood of a shrunken, weakened Greece for years to come.
During the country’s deep and prolonged crash, which began in late 2009 and worsened in 2011 and beyond, an already low birth rate ticked down further, as happened throughout the troubled economies of southern Europe. Greece was also hit by a second factor, with half a million people fleeing the country, many of them young potential parents. Although Greece has been on the front lines of the migrant wave from the Middle East and North Africa, the majority of new arrivals have moved on to other parts of Europe, and the newcomers don’t make up for the losses.
As a result, the country’s recession has helped produce postwar Greece’s smallest generation — a group of young children who are now reaching elementary age, some arriving at schools wearing second-hand shoes and backpacks, and who are only at the earliest stages of grasping the daunting era they’ve been born into.
“The kids don’t know we used to be better off,” said Sotiria Papigioti, the mother of a first- and a second-grader at Kalpaki. “But when they ask for things, I tell them, ‘We’re not in the position to afford this.’ ”
Greece’s fertility rate, of about 1.35 births per woman, is among the lowest in Europe, and well below the rate of 2.1 needed for a stable population, not accounting for immigration.
But because of the exodus of would-be parents, the number of children born in Greece has dropped more dramatically than the fertility rate — reaching historic lows. In 2009, just before the fiercest parts of the crisis, there were 118,000 births in Greece. The number has since fallen steadily, becoming well eclipsed by the number of deaths. The birth total in 2017, 88,500, was the lowest on record.
Some countries, in the aftermath of economic crises, have seen a quick recovery in their fertility rates. But that is unlikely to happen in Greece, said Byron Kotzamanis, a demographer at the University of Thessaly, because even before the crisis the average woman in Greece wasn’t having children until age 31. Some women who postponed pregnancy during the recession have lost out on their chance entirely.
Over the next six decades, the European statistics office estimates that Greece’s population of 10.7 million will decrease by 32 per cent.
At Kalpaki Elementary, a two-storey schoolhouse off a main road in the country’s mountainous northwest, some of the routines look nearly unchanged from the time the school opened in1996. The days start with a Greek Orthodox prayer. Children play soccer during breaks. Parents say the school has managed admirably during recent years, even while repeatedly cutting salaries and trimming spending by 30 per cent. The principal says Kalpaki Elementary has been fortunate: Unlike some other schools, it didn’t have to cut off its heat.
Still, the demographic changes have left their mark both on the school and on the lives of the children. Twenty years ago, the school had 100 students. Today, because neighbouring schools have closed, it draws students from a far wider area. But Kalpaki now has just 70 students in grades 1 through 6. Of that group, 20 are ethnic Albanians whose parents relocated to Greece mostly in the decades before the crisis. Another 20 children are newly arrived Syrians, whose families are living in a hillside camp while applying for asylum.
In the first-grade classroom, the students have learned this year about sounding out syllables, and triangles, and words to describe the weather in English. The walls have chipping paint, and the closest thing to a piece of technology is the radiator. “We’re a little behind,” Bersou said. Bersou is still waiting to feel steady enough to have children of her own — something she badly wants. She lives in the closest nearby city, 30 minutes away by car, where she’s built a life that is designed to feel temporary: a one-bedroom apartment, only a few friends. Her parents, who saw their own earnings reduced because of the crisis, still help her with car payments and phone bills. As is becoming typical for young Greeks, she is waiting for something better, afraid she is treading water, and doubtful that much will improve.
“It affects your psyche,” Bersou said. “The years pass by, and it’s like: What have I done with my life?”
One of Bersou’s quieter students is Chrysa Papigioti, who likes to draw and wants to be a veterinarian. Chrysa lives in a mountainside village 16 kilometres from Kalpaki where she and her brother are the only elementary-age children. Her father isn’t home much since he took a job as a travelling salesman, selling mattresses and other household items across western Greece — the only job he could find after a period of unemployment.
“She is good at doing her own thing,” her mother, Sotiria, said.
Chrysa and her brother aren’t allowed to watch the news, and their mother said they had never asked her a direct question about any hardship in the country. They didn’t yet need to know about the pay cuts she had taken in her job as a police officer, or the large loan looming over the family, or about how she and so many other parents in the region had helped one another in finding hand-medown clothing and other items for their children.
“Kids don’t need to know everything,” Papigioti said. “I don’t want them to have bad thoughts. I want them to have a childhood.”