German women opt for more than one child - or else none at all

By Ira Schaible Sep 1, 2011, 4:06 GMT

Berlin - German women who decide to have children are increasingly opting for more than one child, while at the same time the number deciding to remain completely childless is also on the rise.

Prominent German women like tennis great Steffi Graf, 42, with two, and the model Heidi Klum, 38, with four, are indicative of the trend.

'The gap between childless women and those with several children has been widening for the past 20 years,' says German demographics researcher Ralf Ulrich.

Germany saw a mini baby boom in 2010, with the average number of children per woman rising slightly from 1.36 to 1.39, the highest level in 21 years. This is good news for those concerned about a declining and ageing population with growing concern about who will look after the aged and pay their pensions in the years ahead.

From currently just under 82 million, the German population is expected to shrink to 74 million by 2050, according to the Statistics Bureau in Wiesbaden, although there are more pessimistic forecasts that the population could decline precipitately to 60 million over the same period.

According to a survey conducted by the Matthias Horx institute that specialises in future studies, around 15 per cent of German women and men do not want children at all, while 54 per cent of those asked between the ages of 16 and 35 would like to have two children.

Andreas Steinle, the institute's head, believes this indicates that: 'The birth rate will rise slowly in the years ahead, but this is an extremely drawn-out process.'

The more prosperous regions in the country, for example around the major cities of Frankfurt and Munich, are already showing this trend.

Frankfurt, scorned by many Germans as the city of cold finance and high crime rates, has turned into a city of families. The birth rate rose more rapidly in the banking capital than anywhere else in Germany between German reunification in 1990 and 2009.

Second place in a survey of 412 municipalities conducted by the official German demographics institute was taken by Munich.

'Frankfurt offers good job opportunities and for this reason attracts young families,' Steinle says. 'And once one child is there, a second soon follows.' He believes a city like Frankfurt offers well educated women more opportunities to find the right job, and to combine this with having a family.

The flip side of the coin is that a fifth of all women aged between 40 and 45 were childless at the end of 2009, according to the survey. And the trend here is also upward.

The survey indicated that almost a third of all women currently aged 30 would remain childless, according to Ralf Ulrich, director of the demographics and health department at the University of Bielefeld.

'Education and professional success have a contraceptive effect,' Steinle says. 'First career and then children - and then it's often too late.' German society has to break the link here, he believes.

Ulrich is convinced that relatively recent moves to pay parents - both fathers and mothers - to take time off work to look after newborn babies has had no demographic effect, even though last year saw the birth of 13,000 more babies than in 2009.

'The rise in 2010 represents the conceptions that were postponed during the economic and financial crisis year of 2009,' he says.

This effect can be seen in other countries as well. For example, in the United States, since 2007, the year in which the subprime mortgage crisis began to take effect, the number of births has declined by around 7 per cent.

'Paying parents to stay at home is based on an over-optimistic and one-sided diagnosis of the situation,' Ulrich says. It assumes that couples decide not to have children as a result of their own actual economic situation. 'That is simplistic.'

More important in deciding whether to have a child are factors like mobility and a stable partnership, and the state is not in a position to have much impact on these, he believes.