Pearl - September 25, 2026


“London Is Running Out of CHILDREN” @JustPearlyThings

Mentioned
Hillingdon Redbridge Dagenham
The Life of a Real Ninja “Single Moms Keep Bringing ABUSIVE Men Around Their Children” @JustPearlyThings

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

200.31

Word count

299

Sentence count

11

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 scale, London's highest fertility rates, almost double Islington's, are in Barking and Dagenham,
00:00:05.760 Redbridge and Hillingdon. We are already seeing the impact of fewer children. Schools are closing,
00:00:11.960 maternity units are closing, key workers are leaving the city, which has an impact on
00:00:16.120 the workforce and the economy. But what does that tell us about the direction that a city is heading
00:00:22.060 in? If you have a hollowing out of children, it has all kinds of impacts on different urban
00:00:27.700 institutions um so there's a kind of a famous saying in in urban design and urban planning
00:00:33.140 like children are indicators species if you see children on the sidewalks in streets going in and
00:00:38.840 out of schools and parks and playgrounds that's a sign of a healthy city if you see a dearth of
00:00:43.940 children in the city that that's that rings alarm bells that this city is not healthy it's not
00:00:49.100 functioning the way it should we need to tackle this as an absolute emergency if that continues
00:00:53.780 on the current projections, we'll see a doughnut effect
00:00:56.140 where we've got virtually no children left in inner London
00:00:58.740 and only in the outer boroughs.
00:01:01.020 That would be an existential challenge for London.
00:01:03.600 The mayor says he's tackling these pressures
00:01:05.340 by increasing affordable housing,
00:01:07.400 funding free school meals and supporting public services.
00:01:10.720 The government says they've improved parental leave,
00:01:13.340 rolled out 30 hours of...
00:01:14.600 But see, this is what I mean. 1.00
00:01:16.180 Women are complaining about a problem 1.00
00:01:17.980 and society tries to fix it, 1.00
00:01:19.380 but women are never going to be happy. 1.00
00:01:20.960 We have more options for women than ever. 1.00
00:01:23.240 houses are cheaper in the country than ever you can work from home there's a lot of choices to 1.00
00:01:26.940 have kids and we just don't like kids that much unfortunately