Married… with children?

The study by Prof. Anna Borg and Prof. Liberato Camilleri, commissioned by the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality (NCPE), which explored the issues surrounding work-life balance, came out with a number of recommendations.

These included reviewing the policy on early childcare, paid parental leave during the child’s first year, financial and housing support for families, and challenging gender norms to promote shared responsibilities between women and men.

But these were largely ignored because few people actually bother to read an entire article from start to finish. So, predictably, what made the headlines and sparked a social media fire storm were two specific recommendations – a suggestion to extend school hours to incorporate extra-curricular activities, and a suggestion made by economics lecturer Rose Marie Azzopardi during the conference, for couples to have at least three children, rather than raising pets.

The suggestion to have longer school hours deserves an article (if not a thesis) of its own and cannot be taken in a vacuum or treated as a simple yes or no question, because the benefits and repercussions are wide-ranging and complex.

Just as complex is the issue of the size of Malta’s families. It is no secret that the Maltese as a nation have had progressively less children with every generation. My own family tree is a perfect example. My grandmother had eight children in the ‘30s and ‘40s, my mother had three children in the 1960s. My siblings had two children each in the 90s/2000s, while I have no biological children of my own. This inverted generational triangle in the number of children has become the norm in most families.

The reasons for Malta’s shrinking family size can be attributed to a number of factors – the Church’s grip on people’s procreation gradually loosened (or its teachings were simply ignored as people became better educated); access to better birth control and women delaying pregnancy because of their career, or because they do not meet the right person until they are older – a situation that has led to a spike in fertility issues and the need for IVF. Sometimes not having children is not one’s choice at all, and sometimes it is a deliberate choice, when one decides that this path is not for them.

It is also undeniable that financial issues come into play when deciding whether to take the plunge and try for a baby (and any subsequent babies). When you take out a loan based on two salaries, few stop to consider whether they will manage if one person has to stop working for a few years. In the excitement of planning the wedding, buying a home and getting it all furnished, the “shall we have a baby” decision may seem a long way off and something to think about later in the future. But later eventually arrives, and this is the dilemma every woman faces as she often reaches the peak of her career at the same exact time that her ticking biological clock is loudly telling her “it’s now or never”. This is why it comes as something of a shock when a woman fails to conceive naturally, just because she is ready… it is all taken very much for granted, until it dawns on her that she might have left it too late, which brings its own kind of heartache.

On the other hand, there are now at least two generations of women who have somehow managed to persevere and have both family and a career, thanks to obliging and still healthy grandparents and, more recently, free childcare.

But as anyone who has raised children knows, the commitment and obligations only grow as the children get older. Once they are out of childcare and become of school age, there’s a whole new set of balls to juggle and at least one parent or guardian needs to be on hand at all times to avoid a whole swath of latch key kids coming home unsupervised to an empty house. The more kids you multiply to that equation the crazier it gets to cope with everything, unless one can afford a nanny or you have so many children that the older ones become the caregivers of the younger ones (which is what happened back in the day).

There is also the psychological/physical aspect of having more children - not everyone is cut out for it, and it does no one any good to bring more babies into the world who will not be given the proper care and attention, ending up neglected and leading to a whole new set of social problems.

Meanwhile, there is the bigger picture: It is a stark, unavoidable truth that the Maltese population is in serious decline. This will ultimately affect our national identity, unless the children of those who come to live here become assimilated into our culture. On a more pragmatic level, we are already feeling the boomerang effect of a depleted local workforce especially in the health care sector. Both Mater Dei and Karin Grech hospitals would have to be shut down if we did not have the current numbers of foreign nurses and carers. Where have all the Maltese staff gone, everyone keeps asking? Well, from my observation, they are certainly not taking up a profession in health care as their career of choice.

So, when Rose Marie Azzopardi urges everyone to have three children to help halt the dwindling birth rate, she is not wrong. It is simply logical that the lower the birth rate a country has, the less people there will be in the future of that particular ethnicity/race/nationality.

Now we can have an entire debate of ‘what makes a person Maltese?’ Is it being born of Maltese parents even if you are born, say, in Canada?  Or is it being born and raised in Malta even if your parents are, say, Siberian?  For most people, you will only be considered Maltese through the bloodline, that is if at least one of your parents is Maltese.

But leaving aside the semantics, the crux of the problem remains – we have an ageing population in their 80s and 90s who require full-time care, as a direct result of all those children born in my grandmother’s day. Our hospitals are periodically full of patients waiting to be transferred to care homes or waiting for live-in carers to become available. And, according to the United Nations' population unit, the number of adults aged 65 and over will grow from 108,000 in 2024 to 163,000 in 2050.

Put bluntly, we are all facing the prospect of being cared for in our old age by health care workers from other countries.

This is Malta’s reality. We are a tiny island with a low birth rate, which has become dependent on foreign workers for many of our crucial services. But it is not enough to encourage people to have more children for patriotic, nationalistic reasons or “for the economy”; apart from having proper family-friendly policies in place, couples have to really WANT children in their lives. After all, children are not puppies or kittens you can give away (as some heartlessly do) when they no longer suit your lifestyle.

Your children are a commitment and a bond for life… or at least, they should be.