Why does the Portuguese have no children

While in other European countries families grow, families here wan. There are fewer and fewer children and each time you have children later. What saves the birth rate of generational collapse in Portugal is the rate of immigrants that is balancing the stumbling balance of births. For decades this problem of breach of birth has been a priority theme of various governments, all parties and in all legislatures. When the first sirens sounded, we were on their way to the end of the century and the European tail. Since then the sirens have kept linked and no one calls much. It is a kind of background noise that everyone got used to. No one knows how to solve birth in Portugal, reverse the trend and grow families. In addition to diagnoses, punctual scrambles in rights and subsidies little or nothing was done and the results did not appear.

The big problem of birth is that the problem is not just political, it does not depend on conjunctural measures listed in electoral or government programs, let alone ideologies. The problem of birth is its breakage to be a symptom of a society and a country with little hope, rigidly regulated and that suspects tomorrow.
It is difficult to have children in Portugal and it is very difficult to have many children. Obstacles arise in all fields: cultural, social, labor, economic, education, housing, mobility and accessibility. There are no houses for more than two children, no cars for more than three and no day care centers. Labor security is not compatible with insecurity of having children and conciliation is just a scale of priority or a choice, not a true conciliation. Being a mother and working is still juggling and being a father and working is the usual business. It takes time to leave home in the morning, get to the day care, go to work, return to the day care before prolongation, pass the supermarket and get home to start a new day at work. Public transport does not help, traffic does not, the costs and times of all this much less.
Having children in Portugal is, in many cases, to risk falling into poverty, bending costs and career stagnation. A father who is a company director and justifies his absence at the meeting with the Administration because he went to the dentist with his son, he is fried. And that is why and only why there are more men in places of direction than women, since pediatric dentists offices are full of mothers with children and not parents with children. Having children is for all this a dilemma and not a free choice.
Birth policies are policies that help build models of society, living in community, that give security, that facilitate the lives of those who have children so that their children do not become a problem just because they exist. Having children should not and cannot be an act of courage when it is simply proof and a sign of life.