{"id":66762,"date":"2026-08-18T18:43:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/?p=66762"},"modified":"2026-08-18T18:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:50:11","slug":"the-children-we-never-had","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2026\/08\/18\/the-children-we-never-had\/","title":{"rendered":"The children we never had"},"content":{"rendered":"

By \u00c1lvaro J. D\u00edaz-Mella<\/big><\/p>\n

Mom. Dad. These are probably two of the first words we learned and two of the most frequently used words during our childhood.<\/strong> They are so simple that we hardly think about them, yet they are linked to our earliest memories, to the house where we grew up, to the person who held our hand, comforted us, or waited for us when we came home from school. If we continue like this, there will come a time when there will be fewer and fewer children to say them, and, as generations pass, fewer adults who will ever be called Mom or Dad.<\/strong> Perhaps there, in something so simple and so profoundly human, our birth rate crisis can be better understood than in any statistic.<\/p>\n

Vigo is dying. The city of lights is going out<\/a><\/rel>
\nWhen cinema was a way of life in Vigo<\/a><\/rel><\/p>\n

My parents had four children: my three sisters and me. I had one. For many years, that difference didn't mean much to me. Today it does.<\/strong> I remained single until I was 41 and got married on September 28, 2002. I remember perfectly how nervous I was in front of the priest, and when it came time to promise fidelity to my wife, I promised her happiness. The priest didn't correct me; he seemed amused by the slip of the tongue, and the ceremony continued. Our son was born in July 2004, and some time later, we talked about having another.<\/strong> My wife, eight years younger than me, replied rather sarcastically that she didn't want to become a young widow. We laughed, life went on, and that second child never came. Today, with the perspective that years give, I recognize something that I didn't think much about back then: I would have liked to have more children, and I suspect that behind the birth figures there are many stories that, while not the same as mine, end in a similar way.<\/p>\n

I'm not telling you this because my family proves any demographic theory<\/strong>, but when I look at what has happened in Galicia since the late 2000s, I discover that our little story is strikingly similar to that of an entire society. In 2008, 23,175 children were born here; in 2024, there were 13,350, more than 40% fewer.<\/strong> The fertility rate is at 0.95 children per woman, far from the 2.1 associated with generational replacement, and in 2025, according to the provisional data available, while around 13,556 children were born, 33,456 people died: a difference of almost 20,000 in a single year.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most revealing statistic is something else. Surveys indicate that many Spaniards want to have more children than they actually do<\/strong>, and in the 2018 National Statistics Institute (INE) Fertility Survey, almost three out of four women stated they wanted at least two. Therefore, it's too easy to dismiss the problem by saying that young people no longer want children. The truly interesting question is this: what has happened between the family that many people imagine and the one they ultimately manage to create?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There's a song by the Quebecois group Mes A\u00efeux<\/strong>, D\u00e9g\u00e9n\u00e9rations<\/a>, that has always intrigued me. It was written on the other side of the Atlantic, but it could be about Galicia. It traces generations of ancestors who worked the land, descendants who eventually abandoned it, and others who dream again of owning a small piece of it. Something similar happens with family: generations with many children give way to increasingly smaller ones until someone finally dreams of a large table surrounded by children.<\/strong> Swap Quebec for Vigo, and the story feels eerily familiar.<\/p>\n

Our grandparents knew poverty, emigration, backbreaking work, and living conditions that no sensible person would want to return to.<\/strong> Women had far fewer opportunities and freedoms, although they traditionally played a central role in the home, the family, and, in many places, also in the household economy. That image of an almost matriarchal Galicia may seem historically exaggerated, but it contains a recognizable reality: many Galician homes revolved around a woman.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their full integration into the labor market meant economic independence, professional opportunities, and the ability to choose.<\/strong> The problem was that we changed the family model much faster than we changed the labor model. This transformation was presented to us as perfectly compatible with family life thanks to a word we've been repeating for decades: work-life balance. And that's where, in my opinion, one of the great farces of our time appears, not because women work outside the home, but because we never built a truly satisfactory work-life balance.<\/p>\n

For too many families, work-life balance still means juggling<\/strong> childcare, relying on grandparents daily, paying for daycare or caregivers, reducing working hours, or sacrificing career opportunities. We've managed to get both parents to work, but not necessarily to successfully combine work with parenting.<\/strong> Work-life balance shouldn't simply be about finding a place to leave our children while we work, but about having time to be with them.<\/p>\n

Added to this are housing, wages, job insecurity, and increasingly delayed emancipation.<\/strong> Big decisions keep getting postponed: first studies, then work, housing, a partner, and finally, children. When the time comes to think about a second or third child, sometimes the calendar has already started deciding for us; I know because, to some extent, it happened to me.<\/p>\n

Our relationships have also changed. Separation and divorce are now part of life trajectories with a normality unknown to our grandparents' generation.<\/strong> This doesn't mean that divorces are the cause of the low birth rate, nor that those marriages were necessarily better, since many stayed together due to economic dependence, social pressure, or a lack of alternatives. But it seems reasonable to ask to what extent the later formation of stable couples, breakups, and the need to rebuild a romantic life influence a decision that requires long-term thinking: having children.<\/p>\n

In this context, it is striking that the Galician Regional Government, through its Galician Assisted Human Reproduction Plan, includes egg freezing in the public healthcare system<\/strong> for women between 30 and 35 years old who decide to postpone motherhood for personal reasons. As a medical advancement, vitrification can be extraordinarily useful; as a public response to the difficulties that lead to postponing motherhood, it seems to me to be yet another regional band-aid solution. If a woman wants to be a mother but postpones it because she cannot access housing<\/strong>, lacks job stability, or cannot achieve work-life balance, perhaps we should prioritize addressing those obstacles<\/strong> instead of getting used to managing their consequences.<\/p>\n

There are no simple explanations. Malta, for example, combines one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe with the lowest fertility rate in the European Union.<\/strong> No law, subsidy, daycare, or tax break can, on its own, explain or solve such a profound phenomenon. Natality speaks to economics and public policy, but also to our way of life, how we relate to one another, our understanding of commitment, and the priorities we set while believing we still have all the time in the world.<\/p>\n

The consequences are not limited to pensions or the sustainability of the welfare state.<\/strong> A society with fewer children also ends up having fewer siblings, uncles, aunts, nephews, and cousins, and with them, those family networks that for generations were there when someone got sick, grew old, lost a job, or simply needed companionship are reduced. Having or not having children is, of course, a personal choice<\/strong>, but when millions of individual decisions produce a society in which hardly any children are born, the consequences end up affecting us all.<\/p>\n

Today I can't change what I did then, nor do I know what would have happened if I had chosen a different path.<\/strong> Life doesn't allow you to take two paths and then compare the results; I only know that today I would have liked to have one more child sitting around my table. Those who are now in their twenties or thirties are still writing that part of their story<\/strong>, and our obligation as a society is not to tell them how many children they should have, but to ensure that those who want to start a family can do so without unaffordable housing, insufficient wages, incompatible schedules, or the inexorable passage of time ultimately deciding for them.<\/p>\n

Perhaps in this way, thirty years from now, fewer people will be looking back and thinking about the children they never had.<\/strong> And there will still be children for whom two words as old and simple as \"mom\" and \"dad\" are also the first words in their own story.<\/p>\n

\u00c1lvaro J. D\u00edaz-Mella<\/strong>
\nVigo, August 2026<\/p>\n

---<\/p>\n

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