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.
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.
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.
Disagree with you there. Kids need to see their parents in person, and exploring humanities instead of prioritizing work over family and personal close relationships. Work isn’t the most important thing. I don’t care of it’s a gay couple, bi-couple, or a transgender couple with an adopted child. I think intrinsic to the support of LGBTQ communities should be every right afforded straight people, and I think income inequalities between genders needs to go away. At the same time, the value of the worker is what truly needs to change to help bolster all of the above. When we can get back to a much more regulated system (bringing back the regulations that make stock buybacks illegal), reducing the work week to just 32 hours but requiring that no TC concessions happen as a result, and forcing a more equitable share of prosperity from the corporate world to the workers, THAT will do more to help with many of the social issues we face.
Not to mention, the de-gentrification of communities, more rights for workers, affordable housing, and the tremendous benefits that would lead to in reducing our climate change risks, it’s asinine to split hairs over red herrings that distract us from who our true adversaries are: the rich. If you want to counter populism and win over Trump voters, you focus on the areas we have common ground with real life issues we’re facing.
Can you make a point without a straw man? I said nothing of the sort.
And I don’t disagree with your point about daycare; I think people need options, but I disagree with your point about online relationships being dopamine-equivalent to “real” relationships, personally. I’d LOVE to have a family but I have neither the space nor the money to have kids.
Personally I think communal child raising should be more normalized; I think children experiencing many different and at times contradictory viewpoints is good for their development of critical thinking. But I don’t presume to fully know the solution to lose birth rates. I DO however claim that whatever financial incentives are being given, they aren’t enough.
You’re correct that my comment was not inclusive. That was not intentional on my part and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. However, this is a distraction from the main point.
It was not a strawman. I was making a statement about how society is right now, not how it should be. “men can be house spouses”, etc is true but until we have better workplace equality and in absence of daycare, the vast majority of prospective families are going to do some very simple budget math to figure out who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent. It is exactly the “kitchen” crap from years gone by but with some populist indirection to avoid calling it that.
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They don’t need a daycare, they need a parent/family
Why so they want to be some corporate slave for labor, fuck off
You raise another good point. Some people are simply not cut out for raising kids. Or interacting with normal people, for that matter.
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 that seems like a correction that needs to happen.
I think of this daycare idea like public school, you ever notice the high income rich areas have a good public school system whereas the low income don’t?
If you’re on the whole okay with a certain percent of kids failing then on the coarse level it does seem like a good idea.
Sure, but people wanting families are facing these decisions right now. They don’t want to wait for society to get its head screwed on straight. The root comment was “stay at home parents! no more daycare!” but sailed right over all the macro and micro consequences of that.
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.
Here’s a crazy idea, what if we end this second gilded age and return dignity to the working class? Instead of pushing for EV’s, how about we push for sustainable lifestyles and strengthen the family unit by returning much needed time back to workers? Instead of saying women belong in the workforce instead of the kitchen, how about we say nobody “belongs” in either and that we have the choices and freedom to make the decision? What if, thanks to an 8 hour workday four days a week, we drastically reduce the need for day care and allow parents to be more involved directly with their kids instead of setting a soulless worker drone example?
Lastly, how about you take a hint?
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 think you read my comment backwards. I guess to follow your analogy, social media is “soma” and is a problem today.