As a result of this, parents can no longer afford to have many children as they're simply just too expensive. Children are a large part of the dependent population, which relies on the working population to support them through wages, taxes and savings. There is a relationship between the size of the dependent and non-dependent population, known as the dependent ratio which will have an affect on the future generations. For example, people are having less children in order to reduce the burden of dependency, however, over time it will only increase the burden of dependency as it will result in a smaller working population.
Another reason as to why there were so many births in the 19th century would be because of the high infant mortality rate. Most infants wouldn't survive to the age of five, therefore, parents would produce more in the hopes that some would survive. However, thanks to the help of higher health and safety standards, the infant mortality rate is on the decline therefore parents no longer need to produce so many children. However some sociologists like Brass and Kabir (1978) reject the proposal that small families are a result of the decline in the infant mortality rate. They argued that even though there was a lower infant mortality rate in rural areas, it's not where the trend of small families began, but in urban areas where there was still a high infant mortality rate. .
Births are not the only contributors to the change in UK population, deaths also contribute to Britain's demographic changes. Since 1900 UK's death rate has been reasonably stable with an estimate of 600,000 deaths per year with the exception of a few fluctuations. Over time there has been an overall decline in the death rate. Tranter (1996) explains that the majority of the decline in the death rate during 1850-1970 was because less people were dying from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (TB), typhoid, measles, etc.
