I'm endlessly fascinated by two types of women in their thirties.

The first spent her twenties and early thirties building the career, climbing, delivering, saying yes to everything —and only now, in her mid to late thirties, is she settling down and starting a family. The timeline finally caught up with the plan.

The second looked at that same "rigid" path, degree, job, house, husband, baby, in that order, by a certain age — and quietly put it down. For her, being thirty is about enjoying herself, doing work that means something to her, and building a life that isn't just the next box ticked.

Why the fascination?

Because having a baby in the UK is not for the faint of heart. The NHS says a baby (in the UK) is born every 54 seconds. That statistic couldn't feel more real when you turn 30. Suddenly you open Instagram and it's all pregnancy announcements and pumpkin patches, captioned "just me and my little bestie."

But the reality is quite different. Births in England and Wales are at their lowest level since the 1970s. Most developed countries are watching their fertility rates fall, and some are throwing money at the problem trying to reverse it.

What I find really interesting is this third, quieter category of women that's growing faster than either: the women who aren't sure they want kids at all, and are increasingly comfortable saying so out loud. New Ipsos polling from this summer found that half of British women aged 18 to 50 have either delayed having children or decided against having more of them, with the cost of raising a child cited as the single biggest reason. Separate research suggests somewhere around three million UK women aged 16 to 45 are likely to remain childfree.

This isn't women falling out of love with the idea of motherhood. It's women doing the sum in advance, more openly than any generation before them.

The question underneath it is blunt: can they really afford to give up their time, their money, and their career for kids? And underneath that one is a second, quieter question — can they even afford not to, given how much of a woman's identity and options still get built around whether she has children at all. Neither answer comes cheap. That's the actual sum.

The undecided women are running these numbers before they have a child. Sophie's story (a little later) shows what those numbers can actually cost once you're already in it.

But let's get into the meat and potatoes.

You basically need two incomes to get by in the UK now. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's most recent Minimum Income Standard puts it at £74,000 a year for a couple with two children just to reach a decent, not lavish, decent — standard of living. That's not a number one salary comfortably covers on its own anymore, which is precisely why "just have one parent stay home" stopped being realistic advice for most families a long time ago. Both parents work. Both parents have to.

Which is where the second problem shows up: the working year and the school year were never built to fit together. The average full-time worker in England gets around 28 days of annual leave. UK schoolchildren get roughly 65 days off. That's not a small gap. It's more than a month of childcare every single year that someone has to find, pay for, or take unpaid, on top of the six week summer stretch that costs the average family £1,145 per child to cover.

So both parents are working because they have to, and neither of them has enough leave to cover the time their kids are actually off. Something always has to give. And increasingly, what gives is the job — not because women want it to, but because the maths simply doesn't close any other way.

Which brings us to Sophie.

Sophie has done this dance three times now.

After her second child, she went back to work. Six months later, she was made redundant.

She moved to a new employer. Seven months in, they let her go too.

She’s now been at her current employer for two years, and she thought this one might finally be different. This year she asked for unpaid leave to cover the summer holidays. It was agreed. Then it was un-agreed, because — in her account — she suddenly had "too much work" to be spared. So she went back and reframed the same request as parental leave instead, which employers are legally required to grant. That was approved. A week later, she was put through a performance review. She's said, pointedly, that she doesn't think any of it is unrelated.

We want to be fair here: we only have Sophie's side of this, and performance reviews happen for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with timing. But timing is exactly the thing that makes women in her position feel like they're being tested, like every entitlement they use gets quietly logged somewhere, waiting to be brought up later. Whether or not that's provable, it's a very real reason so many mums don't go back after the second child, or the third.

Not because they don't want to work, but because they've learned that work keeps finding a way to make them pay for it anyway.

Having your own business is one way to mitigate this challenge.

There's no manager to ask permission from when school breaks up. No redundancy risk tied to a return date, no performance review that mysteriously lands the week after you've used an entitlement you were legally owed. If you're the one signing off the diary, "I need six weeks in the summer" isn't a negotiation — it's just how the year is shaped.

It's not clean, though. Self-employment swaps one set of risks for another (maternity pay and sick pay look different)

Sophie's employer kept finding reasons to make her pay for taking time off. When you run your own show and there's no one to blame but there’s also no one covering for you either.

But the portfolio career movement is really taking off. Instead of one employer, one salary, one point of failure, you build a living out of several.

So what does that look like?

Some people are consulting one day a week, creating a course or product on the side, freelancing clients, or even have a small stake in someone else's business.

The beauty of this way of working is that there is no single client or contract that can make you redundant. There's always another stream to lean on while you sort it out. It's not about doing more for the sake of it; it's about not needing any one person's permission for your year to work.

I really believe creating your own revenue stream is the way forward and below are some tips to get you started.

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial or legal advice and we are not certified financial advisers or lawyers! This newsletter is strictly educational. Please  consult with an independent financial advisor or lawyer for advice on your specific circumstances.