KEY POINTS:
When Janet Sceats interviewed 68 women in their 20s and 30s, she uncovered a painful contradiction between their ideals and reality.
Her research, based on interviews with women in Auckland and Waikato, was commissioned by a Japanese institute three years ago which wanted to understand how New Zealand had sustained a higher birth rate than Japan and much of Europe.
As the Japanese expected, demographer Sceats found a general pro-child attitude. Almost unanimously, the women said New Zealand was a good place to bring up children. Some had returned from overseas specifically for that purpose.
But many of them had not actually had children themselves, or had only one.
"Most of the women really did want to have children," Sceats says. "But there was an increasing realisation that they were not going to have as many as they would have liked because of other pressures - economic and career."
A study by Statistics NZ analysts Bill Boddington and Robert Didham has found one in every six women born in 1965, who are 42 this year, had still not had a child by the time of last year's census.
They trace a steady rise in lifetime childlessness, from a low of about 8 per cent among those born in the late 1930s who had children at the height of the postwar baby boom, to about 17 per cent among those born in 1965.
Women born in 1975 are still only 32 and many still expect to have children. But Boddington and Didham estimate that, on present trends, 25 per cent will never have them.
In a mammoth new book, The New Zealand Family From 1840: A Demographic History, Sceats and her husband of 45 years, Professor Ian Pool, argue society is failing both those would-be mothers and parents who told Sceats they felt guilty about the parenting compromises they were forced to make to maintain careers.
"In many ways New Zealand has failed its families," the couple write, with co-author Arunachalam Dharmalingam. "Family policy instruments and the socio-economic environment, rather than coming to the aid of the family, may be exacerbating the situation and putting undue pressure on households."
Sceats and Pool have what is now the standard family of two children, who have each had two children too - although, like many New Zealand families, the now-adult children and grandchildren are all overseas.
But when they talk to their friends, many are facing the end of their family lines.
"There is a real secret sadness in a lot of families that there are not the grandchildren that people expected."
The story of the New Zealand family is clear in the graph. Nineteenth-century European settlers in New Zealand started off having even more children than those who stayed behind - enough to have almost seven children each in their lifetimes if the total fertility rate of the 1870s had been maintained.
But fairly quickly, they fell into line with European norms until the fertility rate dropped just below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in the 1930s Depression.
There was a remarkable baby boom after World War II only for fertility rates to decline again to just under replacement level for almost all of the past 26 years, with a current rate of 1.8.
Maori fertility stayed high for longer and was still nudging seven as late as 1960, but has plunged to 2.6 today.
Our overall fertility rate, currently 2.0, is still fifth-highest in the 30-nation OECD. Since 1970, our mean age at first childbirth has gone up 5.6 years. In the OECD as a whole, it has gone up only 3.4 years, from 23.8 to 27.2.
The prime facilitator of these changes has been the contraceptive pill. Apart from allowing couples to postpone childbearing, the pill also had an impact on marriage. Whereas fewer than 10 per cent of women born in the 1940s lived with a partner before age 25 without marrying, 60 per cent of those born in the 1960s did so.
And where marriage had once been the "valve" that turned on childbearing, just living together was not.
In 1956, just under 30 per cent of all working-aged women were in paid work. By last year, 60 per cent were in paid work, and new census figures this week showed that in the past 10 years alone the proportion of all working-aged women working full-time grew from 37 per cent to 41 per cent.
By 2004, two-thirds of the women in Janet Sceats' interviews said they considered the effect on their careers before deciding to have children.
"Some said they worried pregnancy would compromise their careers," Sceats writes. "Others were worried that if they were out of their jobs too long they would lose touch or continuity. For some, however, the pregnancy represented a chance to change direction or escape from an unsatisfactory job."
In comparison with other countries where the same social changes have been happening, Pool and Sceats say our current fertility rate is being held up by a relatively large number of women now in their early 30s, which has become the most common age to give birth.
When that bulge passes they predict that New Zealand's fertility trajectory may join those of Australia, Canada and Britain.
Pool and Sceats believe the ideal is to stabilise our population and they see real problems in allowing it to shrink.
"I hear people like [columnist] Joe Bennett saying, 'Why should I support people with children?'," Pool says. "Well, he is going to need someone to bring his meal in to him and help feed him when he's 85."
More importantly, the couple believe we are not freely choosing our low fertility. Their evidence suggests we would actually like to have more babies - it's that we can't fit them in.
A national survey of 1000 women by Waikato University in 2001 found 90 per cent of women in their 20s, and 87 per cent of those in their 30s, either had or intended to have children. Yet Boddington and Didham suggest that only 75 per cent of current 32-year-olds will actually ever have children.
Another survey of 1048 women by Fertility NZ in 2005 found 84 per cent of women said the ideal time to have children was in their 20s. But 67 per cent of women actually in their 20s and almost half of those in their 30s, said they were not ready to have children.
In that survey, women with no children said the key factors to consider before having them were a stable relationship (91 per cent), good incomes (77 per cent), the man's career (68 per cent), the woman's age (63 per cent), owning a home (58 per cent) and the woman's career (56 per cent). But 24 per cent of the women were not in a relationship at all.
"It seems it's very difficult for our young people to have more permanent-type relationships," Pool says."They are not actually meeting one another. They are working very long hours. Their only free time might be on a Saturday night and they might even have to go to work on a Sunday."
Incomes and careers have also become much less secure, with a shift over the past 20 years from standard 40-hour jobs in manufacturing to much less predictable service jobs.
Pool and Sceats quote an American writer who says this insecurity forces people to "work harder and promote themselves more relentlessly".
As one young woman told Sceats, when asked about taking leave to have children: "I wouldn't get my job back, [there's] no way they'd keep it open for 12 months, so I'd be moved aside or I wouldn't get back in."
Another traditional pre-requisite for children - home ownership - has slipped from 74 per cent of all households in 1991 to just 67 per cent in last year's census..
Ironically, Sceats says, women have won "reproductive choice" in terms of the right not to have children - but now see the right to choose to have children slipping away from them.
"Think about all the energy that went into enabling people to control fertility," she says. "Now we have some people who would actually like to have kids but will end up not having children, and we don't put so much energy into that."
As in the 1960s, the issue is both individual and social.
At an individual level, the Maxim Institute suggested this week that couples should simply "reprioritise" - give less time to work and more time to their relationships and children, even if that means doing without some of the traditional material priorities such as owning their own homes.
And at a social level, Pool and Sceats point to policies, both in New Zealand in the past and in places such as France and the Nordic countries today, which could help couples to have children.
Money is an obvious start. OECD research suggests that a family benefit package in France in 2004 may have increased births by about 5 per cent.
The Labour Government has increased family support tax credits and introduced 14 weeks of paid parental leave.
But both are tightly targeted to help those in paid work.
Our 14 weeks of paid leave is also less than in any other Western country except Australia and the United States, which do not have it at all.
Labour has increased subsidies for childcare and introduced 20 hours a week of free early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds. OECD research suggests that these policies, if they genuinely cut costs and increase the availability of childcare, could help women to have more children.
But again, we are starting from well behind many European countries. A 2005 OECD report found that childcare costs for two children aged 2 and 3 cost a higher proportion of household income in New Zealand than in all but five of 23 other developed nations.
Pool and Sceats would also like to see the Government bring back the kind of low-interest loans that it provided to first-home buyers in the baby boom era. They believe the student loan scheme should be reviewed because it has led many young people to postpone childbearing until they pay off their loans.
And they cite American authors who advocate giving parents the right to take more days off each year to care for sick children or other family responsibilities.
"So it's a hugely complex wide range of positive things - not so much to have children, but to support them once they are born," says Pool.
But, as Sceats says: "If we want New Zealand to be the sort of place we still want to live in, then it just makes sense to look after families, because families are the building blocks of our society."
* The New Zealand Family From 1840: A Demographic History, by Ian Pool, Arunachalam Dharmalingam and Janet Sceats, Auckland University Press, $50.
