These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
Have they tried raising the salaries so that one parent can stay at home and actually take care of the children, instead of sending them to way too expensive daycares. Having children is a “luxury” nowadays.
Just limit work to 35 hours (10-10-10-5) and have parents alternate schedules
Fuck that, have you worked 10 hour shifts? Pretty sure studies have shown you max out productivity at 6. I say 24 hour work week, 6 hours 4 days a week.
If you’re going to boil it down to bare economics, daycare should come out ahead. 2 people can take care of 9 babies versus a stay at home parent taking care of 1 or 2. And realistically today, advocating for a stay at home parent is telling women to go back to the kitchen. It’s regressive, unnecessary, and not actionable advice.
I would instead argue that modern life is not supportive of real-life, tight communities and lasting relationships. Online social lives are a starkly inferior substitute for real life but they’re easier to access and give the equivalent dopamine hit.
Aldous Huxley described your vision of Utopia in brave new world. I think it’s ridiculous, unobtainable, and overall a terrible approach to society. Life is all about lasting and meaningful relationships, so any approach that views these as optional or outdated is broken before it even starts. Your entire premise is flawed from the start.
I do believe that nobody “belongs in the kitchen” as far as gender roles go. What we’re up against is the weakness of the family unit in society and the breakdown of lasting friendships contributing to mental health issues. Online social lives are objectively bad for us, and I’d argue that the dopamine hit is just helping burn our dopamine receptors even more.
Regardless this reminds me of the classic argument that was had back in the 80’s about the kitchen itself, that it’s more “efficient” for people not to cook at home but to go to a place that prepares food en masse for a community. This was during the Soviet Communism era and there was a side debate going on. Western culture favored the family unit, while a communist concept favored social efficiency at the cost of liberties.
I don’t think it’s regressive to desire to have more time to be with your kids, whether it’s day care, school, etc. The real issue isn’t economics and progressive concepts, I think we’d all agree that a robust public education system is valuable, and that we should have economics that let us pick our kids up from school rather than send them to a day care. It’s not about sending anyone to the kitchen.
I like our kitchen, I like cooking food for the family, and I even enjoy it as a way to wind down after work. Modern life not supportive of tight knit communities and lasting relationships is complete bullshit. Modern life in that viewpoint is the continuous hustle culture and prioritization of work over a fulfilling life experience, and in my opinion your viewpoint is regressive for that reason alone. Kill hustle culture, eat the rich, and let’s have economics that give us a choice.
The food analogy is great. But I think there’s a quantitative difference in effort and long term commitment between what to have for dinner and how you’ll afford to raise your family.
Hmmm I’d like to stay at home and I’m the man. We both earn about the same, she earns more. I don’t trust daycare workers. You optimize for what you value, if you value economics you’re simply not going to optimize for what’s best for the child. Because at all the cross roads where the biological needs or psychological needs conflict the economical value you’ll not be making those choices.
At a coarse level, children from families with more money are better off so I disagree. Daycare is a small part of a child’s life. Really 3-4 years out of 18 and of those, only 9-5 at that. In exchange, you afford a nicer, safer town with better schools. If your family chooses a stay-at-home parent, you won’t afford those places when competing against dual income families.
And realistically today, advocating for a stay at home parent is telling women to go back to the kitchen. It’s regressive, unnecessary, and not actionable advice.
No, what YOU said is regressive. The commenter never mentioned women; men can just as easily be house spouses, and that’s also without mentioning non-binary partners. You just assumed they meant women and ran with it
Edit: grammar
Also if more families could have a stay-at-home parent or could have the parents taking turns (for example, first parent A goes to work while parent B is with the kids for a week, and then do the opposite next week), then daycares would still have more resources to take of children whose families don’t want to or can’t have this kind of arrangement. And this would require bigger salaries so that families could afford to have only one working adult.
Are you seriously claiming that we’re done with equality in the workplace (positions, salary, respect)? No? Then stop misrepresenting what I said as some neanderthal spiel. We need daycare to give people options. Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.
