[Cet article est extrait du hors-série n°91 de Courrier international consacré à “la bombe démographique mondiale”].
At 11, Alonso is already a preteen. “Alonso, tell us why you don’t want siblings?”
‘Because they’re going to break my things, want to fight, get into my bed and prevent me from sleeping. Before, I wanted a brother. But rather a big brother.
– Why ?
— To remain my parents’ favourite.”
And that’s the case. Like every single child on this planet. The minimum to ensure the continuity of the species. With the exception of dictatorial China in the late 1970s, there is no historical precedent for an only-child society. We grew up with siblings, for better or for worse.
However, the developed world is having fewer and fewer children. Women are fighting to find a place for themselves in patriarchal society, and they are no longer baby factories with no other horizon than to marry and give birth to numerous offspring. People tend to have fewer children and raise them together in order to share the workload. But the balance between work and private life remains difficult to find, and the economy goes from crisis to crisis.
The result is a world with fewer children, and more only children. By choice or by obligation. And Spain, like other countries, is no exception. In 1975, the average number of children per woman was 2.8. Today, the fertility rate in Spain is 1.19. It is one of the lowest in the world.
One in four couples without offspring
“The decline in fertility since the end of the 1970s, which worsened in the 1990s, and the increase in life expectancy have led to an aging population. This fall means that 23% of couples find themselves without descendants. It all depends on social and economic prospects, but in the near future we should not expect that we will move away from values that oscillate between 1.1 and 1.2 children per woman”. says Diego Ramiro, director of the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography of the Higher Council for Scientific Research [principal organisme public de recherche en Espagne].
Dans leur étude intitulée “Why don’t women have all the children they say they want” [“Pourquoi les femmes n’ont pas autant d’enfants qu’elles le souhaiteraient”]Alícia Adserà, from Princeton University in the United States, and Mariona Lozano, from the Center for Demographic Studies of the Autonomous University of Bar