Something funny’s going on. Despite having the lowest rate of participation by women in the workforce, in the whole of the European Union, we also have a birth rate that’s lower than the EU average. The birth rate in Malta is exactly the same as in Germany, where women enter the workforce as a matter of course, even when they have families. Women in Malta aren’t staying at home to raise broods of six children. So what are they staying at home for? Good question, as they say when they don’t know the answer.

A couple of articles have appeared in the newspapers suggesting that this strange combination of a very low birth rate with very low participation of women in the workforce is the result of poor childcare facilities that don’t allow women to go out to work. This doesn’t make sense at first glance. If women are not working outside the home because of lack of childcare facilities, then they might as well have more children than the current 1.37 per woman. If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound.

As soon as Maltese women have their 1.37 children, they can’t leave the house to work, which means that there isn’t the money to fund the upbringing of more children. If you’re stuck at home with one kid, you might as well be stuck at home with three – it’s actually easier, because three kids amuse each other and ignore their mother most of the time, but one kid focuses on mummy and wants constant attention from sunrise to bedtime. Ah, but here’s the catch. More children means that more money must be spent, but households in which the woman doesn’t work generally have less money than those with two incomes – unless the man brings home not just the bacon but the whole pig.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Mummy has all the time in the world to raise two, three or even four kids, but daddy’s salary might be sorely taxed by them, and mummy’s temper will be sorely frayed by struggling to make ends meet. In the end, mummy will probably end up hating daddy, and another marriage will hit the law courts in a storm of screaming and broken crockery.

Standards of upbringing have changed. Not so long ago, children wore old clothes and hand-me-downs and had one outfit for “best” and a couple of pairs of scrappy jeans for the rest of the time. Food was pretty primitive (and in many households, sad to say, it still is): minestra and bread every day, or a cheap cut of meat fried in plenty of poor oil. Bath night was once a week, the minimum of electricity was used, homes were unheated even in bleakest January and children didn’t expect much and so that’s exactly what they got. Some people look on those as the good old days when children knew their place and turned out the better for it. I don’t know where they got this idea. You’d have to be mad not to want to be a child today instead of a child of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or even 1980s. Children are miles better off today and lead more interesting lives with better opportunities. They have more stimulation so their minds are sharper, and they are better informed all round.

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You can gripe about them watching too much television, but let’s face it, at least they’ve got television to watch. We had black-and-white RAI and Xandir Malta, and when my mother was really at her wit’s end, she would plonk us in front of the test card with the promise that The Banana Splits would begin “soon”. That test card, and the music that signalled the start of broadcasting for the evening, are engraved in my mind. We couldn’t watch television because before 6pm there wasn’t any and after 6pm there was one show in black and white.

Let’s see it from the child’s point of view, for a change: nowadays, children have more fun and are more comfortable, unless they have the kind of parents who drag them around various “activities” or insist that they be given piles of homework and then stand over them while they do it. The only way in which childhood was better in the past is that we were free to run around without being harassed by the constant monitoring of frightened and nervous adults. Last week, a man told me – as though it was a milestone – how his 12-year-old daughter had got a bus in to Sliema to go shopping with friends. My eyes were on stalks.

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Gone are the days when women popped out broods of children and more or less left them to fend for themselves in between putting the borma on the table once a day. Bringing up baby is now a specific, planned project, and on the whole the results are better just so long as mummy doesn’t go over the top and cross the boundaries in an attempt at merging with her child. The relationship with the child becomes a love story which, in the end, suffocates the child’s development.

I think this desire to do the job as well as possible is one of the main drivers, apart from money/work, behind the low birth rate. The understanding is that you can concentrate on one child in a way that you can’t concentrate on three or four. That this is best for the child is not a view I share, though I understand why people might think this way. As one of four children born in six years, and the mother of three children born in two-and-a-half years, my view is that children stand to benefit more from a close relationship with siblings than from a close relationship with parents, not least because siblings are generational contemporaries. You can be friends with your siblings, but there’s something slightly unhealthy about being friends with your parents. On the whole, I think that children much prefer to hang around the house with siblings who are roughly their own age than to hang around the living-room with their parents and no one their age in sight. But if more children are too much for the parents, then they’re too much for the parents, full stop, and nobody should quarrel with this when it’s the parents who have to raise them.

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If we look more closely at the conundrum that is Malta’s very low birth rate coupled with lack of women’s participation in the workforce, we might just find that it’s due to self-protectiveness on the part of both men and women. We forget that when children are born to a couple, the man has as much say in the decision as the woman, and very often he has the final say, overruling his wife’s or girlfriend’s desire to have a second, third or even first child. The difference between girlfriends and wives is that a girlfriend will get pregnant “by accident” but a wife won’t.

Many men have all sorts of fears about the presence of children in a relationship: that it will turn their well-ordered lives upside down without any positive consolation, that the woman in their life will metamorphose into a sobbing wreck who spends her days in track-suits with dirty hair, that they will be “taken over” by demanding infants and that the house will become a tip of nappies and bright plastic toys. The bottom line is that they will be unable to self-delude any more that they are bachelors in disguise, and that one day Jordan will come along and carry them off on a white charger.

Women have all kinds of reservations about having children, too, but these are generally overwhelmed by the biological drive towards reproduction. The trouble is that one baby is enough to satisfy the natural cravings of most women for children. They go through one pregnancy and one birth and the hunger driven by the biological clock suddenly and mysteriously evaporates. Well, maybe not mysteriously. And so we suddenly wake up and find ourselves with a low birth rate. As contraception gets better and women get more efficient at using it – which is part of that self-protectiveness I was talking about – there are few accidents except among school-girls and teenagers – and mistresses.

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The low birth rate, some say, is because women are getting married later, or resigning themselves to having a child while single because the years are going by and there’s no potential husband on the horizon. I’m not quite sure about this. It might seem that way on paper, but what I pick up is quite different: it’s a reluctance to have a child until the very last minute. The arrival of a baby is deliberately being put off because – and this is only what I gather through clues in conversation – a baby is seen as an interruption to the life of a couple rather than as a continuation of it in a seamless flow. It’s a case of “let’s do as much as we can together, and then we’ll succumb to the inevitable and do the necessary, because if we don’t, we might regret it later.”

It’s because babies have come to be seen as an expensive and inconvenient project that they are put off until late in the day. Gone are the days – except among the underclass of society – when a woman had a kid, stuck him on her hip and carried right on living, with the rest of the extended family to pitch in when she needed a hand. Babies have escalated into a frightening and shockingly costly commitment, rather than just something that you do and get on with the rest of life. And that’s the real reason why Maltese women are not having babies even though they don’t have a job to go to every day. They don’t want the palaver, or perhaps the men in their life don’t want the palaver.

The life of a woman who stays at home with one child while her husband goes out to work is a very, very easy one, unless the husband is a nasty and stingy person who makes her feel like a beggar in her own house. It is a very easy life even for the husband, who returns to a well-ordered household with supper on the table, instead of to a tip with dirty clothes and toys strewn everywhere, yesterday’s dishes still in the sink, children playing Tarzan with the curtains and his once-sexy bride sobbing in a heap with her hair up in a plastic grip, shouting that she rues the day she met him and that she will never have sex with him again as long as she lives.

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If 1.37 children and no job is the way Maltese women want it, then I see no need to question the situation. It’s only if they’re doing this against their will, or feel that they have no choice, that we have to push for change. It’s counter-productive and even dangerous to brainwash women into having more children if they feel they can’t look after them properly, or if it would put them under too much financial strain. One child, no job and a husband to pay your way is the easy life, and we would have to be puritanical indeed to condemn women for choosing it. A child in this household is safer than a child in a household where mummy is at her wit’s end. It’s up to them to choose how to live their life and it certainly isn’t any of our business.

While it might seem that the husband might like having a wife who brings in some of the money and spares him some of the burden, the truth could not be more different. I have yet to meet a man who is grateful to his wife for working and paying some of the household bills. This has nothing to do with masculine pride and everything to do with the all-consuming desire for peace and a well-ordered life. Men would much rather their wives stayed home because a working wife creates more household work, childcare obligations and general all-round stress for them, instead of taking care of all that herself. And if she does take care of it all herself, then she lets him know about it, several times a day and in a very loud voice.

Men prefer to have more financial pressure and less personal household stress than the other way round. Men like to put things in mental compartments: family and home in one box; work in another box; girlfriend, if there is one, in yet another box. It’s when the walls between the different boxes collapse that they suffer all kinds of stress and confusion, and they absolutely hate it. This explains why the woman who calls her man at work to report that the drains have just exploded gets such short shrift (Home has butted into Office – oh dear). It also helps to explain why women are staying home with their solitary child. Women like peace and quiet, too.