We are the country having least babies in the whole of the European Union. Maltese parents now have an average of one child, and this in a span of three generations. My grandparents had six children, my parents two, and I have one (blended family aside). If it keeps going like this, the Maltese gene will soon make a vanishing act.
The minute the Eurostat numbers came out, placing us at the bottom of the baby table, the headlines screamed that we need to tackle this crisis. Indeed, if there are no babies, there will be no adults and we will become an elderly retirement island. Experts were consulted, and with a furrowed brow pointed out that there’ll be no one to pay National Insurance to cover our pensions and the health service.
So what’s happening? How did we go from families with six, eight or 10 members down to three? There is, of course, the shift in the age at the time of marriage and the age when women give birth to their first child; and the fact that sadly, nature does not always cooperate. However, this is the same throughout Europe, even in the countries with the highest fertility rates.
So let us explore other possible factors that are making Maltese parents not keen on having their own five-a-side football team.
Let’s have a look at the countries most pregnant with children, according to Eurostat – France, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark and the UK. And let’s leave aside the UK for the moment because the high fertility rates are a result of let’s-get-over-the-Brexit-depression-by-procreating. So what do the French, Swedes, Irish and Danish have that makes them more baby-friendly?
A couple get 480 days of paid parental leave in Denmark and Sweden
Well, take France, they work the least hours; overtime is not very common; they take more holidays than the average European; and there’s even a governmental policy that allows employees to disconnect from work e-mail if they are not in the office. All this is obviously conducive to some romantic time, and with the added bonus of the best wine in the world, it’s easy to get in the family way. And then to top it all, as the bestselling book tells us, “French children don’t throw food”. So obviously if you have baby number one, and he eats up all the greens without you having to spend 10 hours playing plane on a spoon, then of course, you’d go on and have another one or two.
And what about Sweden and Denmark? Ah, the two lands of flexible, family-friendly jobs. These are geographical parcels in the EU where both parents take a conscious decision to both work and look after their children; in fact, for each child, a couple gets 480 days of paid parental leave, which can be taken up until the child turns eight.
Denmark and Sweden are probably the only two countries where men and women equally share life admin – the unpaid, unrecognised work of organising and managing a family household. Therefore, a Danish father won’t jump over the bag of laundry left in the staircase like it was there merely to provide an entertaining obstacle course; oh no, a Danish man would pick up the laundry and sort out its contents while carrying his offspring in a Baby Bjorn. No wonder then, that Denmark has been found to have the happiest people in the world almost every year for the last 50 years.
However, one thing that all the countries at the top of the fertility league have in common, are vast open spaces. People living there can jump in a car and they’re breathing countryside air just a couple of hours drive away. In Malta, we jump in the car, and after a couple of hours we’re still stuck in the same spot, surrounded by concrete and cranes, puffing Ventoline in the mouth of our only child, who in between asthma attacks due to construction pollution, is whining “Are we there yet?”
This is the claustrophobic reality of Malta. And it’s very strange that the Prime Minister’s target is to keep on increasing the population with mystery “foreigners” – and going as far as admonishing us that ħeq, if we want that toy, the metro, then we have to behave and allow him to bring in more people to stack on top of us. The mind boggles.
Any time soon we’ll all be fleeing and having babies elsewhere.
I watched the Malta vs Spain Euro qualifier game on TVM2. What’s with the commentators? You would think they were reporting a funeral, not a football game.
Whenever Spain scored, the word ‘goal’ was barely uttered. All we got were depressing, dreary monologues: “And well, this is the kind of score we expected, Robert. Whoever thought otherwise was not living in the real world, Robert...” And Robert dutifully intercepted in with his own uncheerful sounds.
Consequently, we all went to bed feeling dejected. Which is a shame, because with a bit of oomph from the commentators, we could all have gone to bed feeling pleased that it was not a 12-1 show, and maybe all of us would have been in the mood of let’s-procreate-our-own-football-stars.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece