Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Rising cost of housing encourages women to marry later
A story released today by the Evening Standard reports that the rising cost of housing is helping to push up divorce rates, lower birth rates and encourage women to marry later in England.
A report by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) found that the financial burdens of buying a home are forcing people to work longer hours and put off their retirement.
The ESRC found that the pressures of clambering up the property ladder can also lead to more relationships breaking down.
The ESRC found lifestyles of single people are also affected, with young women in London often choosing to rent in better neighborhoods rather than becoming homeowners in poorer sections of London. But young men are more likely to buy their first home in a rough area in the expectation of moving on to somewhere nicer later.
The ESRC report also confirms earlier studies which found that financial difficulties were causing women to delay having families, often at a cost to their fertility.
The average age of the firsttime mother has risen from 24 in the late Sixties to over 27 now, while recent research has established that female fertility begins to decline in the late twenties.
Ceridwen Roberts, former director of the Family Policy Studies Center, said: "Women know about the biological clock and that it's better to have babies when they're younger, but still think that it's easy to have a child at 45. It's not."
