Couples without children

Birth rates are set to decline as would-be parents discover it’s too expensive to have kids.

Massey University Humanities and Social Sciences professor Dr Natalie Jackson said couples were choosing to have fewer children because they were worried about unknown future costs involved in parenting.

It comes after Statistics New Zealand figures showed almost a quarter of a million more couples were projected to be living without children by 2038.

Some would be parents where children had left home, others would be couples who did not want to have kids.

Research showed birth rates were already down to one or two children per woman in New Zealand.

Jackson said there were many reasons why people were opting not to have children.

Some calculated the financial and psychological costs and decided to err on the side of caution.

Others saw children as just one option among many in their lives.

Gender inequity in the work place which had a big effect on the future of people, particularly women, who have children

Jackson said the cost of housing versus income was another ‘‘rising star’’ in reasons why parents were not having big families.

‘‘These days, couples both need to be out working to pay the rent or mortgage, and while childcare may make it possible, for some, it’s such a juggling act that they stop at just one or two children.’’

Working conditions also made working parent life difficult with people often working long or disrupted hours that were incompatible with school hours and school holidays.

Jackson said low birth rates meant more people were growing up in smaller families, which in turn meant fewer people would go on to have large families.

Empty-nesters and couples without children would become the most common family type.

Hamilton had 27,051 people in couple-withoutchildren families in 2013, according to the 2013 Census.

That year around 513,500 families in New Zealand hadn’t yet had children, were empty-nesters or never had or will have children.

That number was expected to increase by just under 2 per cent a year to 757,000 by 2038.

Population statistics senior manager Peter Dolan said the empty-nesters were expected to be the most significant factor in the growth of couplewithout-children families.

‘‘An increasing proportion of couples who will never have children is also likely to contribute to the growing number of this group of families, but to a much lesser extent.’’

Couple-without-children families account for more than half the projected growth of all families by 2038.