1. Cost of living and child care
2. Work, stress and lack of free time
3. Little to no support from society and community.
The reason this is affecting Korea, Japan and China so much is that there aren't many immigrants to offset the lack of new children being born.
There is a lot of wealth being generated but most of it goes to people who are already wealthy, so most people don't have the "luxury" of enough disposable income, free time, and support to have children.
This is not women's fault, its society's failing
When countries get richer, people start having fewer kids, and giving parents money does not offset this (even if that's what people say they want).
When a couple has a child they have to consider both the cost of the child (food, education, childcare) and also the potential lost earnings that they’re suffering from by taking time off work to look after it.
Packing even more people into these nations, with the added political tensions of making them foreign immigrants vs domestic growth of native population would exacerbate the original problem with added downside.
Look at the density, cost of living and other factors that flow from "too many people in one place". The natural counter trend must run its course.
South Korea has a TFR of .7. France is 1.6. Those aren't the same, and the difference isn't immigration, or easily explained by money. There are huge cultural issues in South Korea.
I don't have a solution for these women, but I notice that the BBC spent a year interviewing Korean women, but no Korean men.
I think a solution for the Korean men who maybe want children and wives who neither want careers of their own nor who insist that the domestic duties be split evenly would be something equivalent to the United States's H1-B Visa: namely, aspiring Korean husbands should be able to sponsor and marry foreign wives when no suitable native born candidates can be found.
Nearly any foreign wife will be eaten alive by how competitive Korea is. Even worse, everyone else in that society will look down on them for not putting their children through the same things - like spending more than they can on extra-curriculars that start at age 4.
The second especially sounds like a recipe for a truly miserable marriage
Wonder what that IV is full of?
I've had them a few times, to be sure, they make you feel awesome.
1. https://expatguidekorea.com/seoul/hydration-iv-therapy-seoul
There's no country with people primarily living in high-rise buildings where TFR is measurably above 1.
>Couples who have children are showered with cash, from monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments are covered, though only for those who are married.
It's not pay after you have a baby that makes people want to have a baby, it's job stability, decent pay and working hours that makes people want to have children.
It's still women who still expect men to be high earners, now men have to do half of the housework on top of spending time with children in the evenings then get screamed at for having mediocre finances when their careers flatline.
They didn't interview men because the responses would not fit the narrative that the BBC seeks.
>It's still women who still expect men to be high earners, now men have to do half of the housework on top of spending time with children in the evenings then get screamed at for having mediocre finances when their careers flatline.
It sounds like you had a bad experience and are now using that to generalize about a large population of people. Why is it only acceptable for men to seek independence and fulfillment from a career? No one is forcing men into a 12 hour a day job, either. It seems only reasonable that if both partners are working, that they split the household chores and child rearing.
Perhaps it’s the working hours, high cost of living, traditional expectations of women and ultra competitive culture that is collapsing society, and not the women wanting better for themselves. Unless your solution is to rollback the clock several decades or force women into motherhood and domestic labor, I’m not even really sure what your point is here.
The solution that many S. Korean women have found for themselves, in order to have a fulfilling career/not be dependent on a husband, is to remain single and/or childless. Clearly these women are fine living on a single income and cleaning up after themselves, so it’s pretty evident that many women aren’t just after high earnings or that they “still expect men to be high earners.” For women who want a career, they don’t also want to come home and be solely responsible for taking care of their husband and kids. If men want to be in a relationship with these career women, then they need to help out around the house. If they don’t want to do that, then it’s pretty clear that these S. Korean women are completely fine being on their own.
> They didn't interview men because the responses would not fit the narrative that the BBC seeks.
Yeah, it’s an article about South Korean women. Not about S. Korean men. Are you saying that the account of these S. Korean women should be totally discounted because they didn’t interview any men?
As society gets richer, opportunity cost of kids goes up.
1. Wages not made. If you're making $100K/year and you take a year off for the kids, that's 100K.
2. Career progression. Harder to put a number on this, but easily worth 6 figures + in certain careers in opportunity cost.
3. Alternative: daycare (runs $2-4K a month or more in HCOL cities).
I hypothesize that a ~100K incentive for having a kid would definitely move the needle for a lot of people and account for at least some of the opportunity costs for middle-high wage earners (I know because the paternity leave at my company was roughly in that range in terms of economic incentive, and it certainly affected my choices). All of the cash programs to date have been a fraction of that at best.
I assume that's not great, but it might be better than working the late shift at Taco Bell for the rest of someone's life.
I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, it could be a solution to low birth rates.
On the other hand, it toes a very fine line on sexism.
It's a pretty bad image for women that we're willing to pay them more to reproduce than most other things. A woman having a baby every 12 months makes 30% more than the median household income. There are economic justifications, but it's a bad look.
While it's nominally a voluntary process, it can be viewed through a lens where we as a society make being poor awful (or fail to make being poor bearable) and the only reliable escape we offer is reproducing, casting doubts on how voluntary participation really is. If a woman is going to get evicted and the only means she can find to get out of that is having a baby, is her participation really voluntary?
I also don't know whether we should financialize having children. That may lead to a very different and less optimal kind of parenting.
The last I've found is disparate impact on genders. I generally get that the benefits are for the child, but $100k is enough that I think it could create dramatically disparate outcomes. We'd practically be offering a down payment on a house, or a way to avoid bankruptcy, or seed funding for a startup, but only to women. Straight men would need to couple with a woman to qualify, gay men wouldn't be able to qualify at all.
That may not apply if this program applies to adoptions too, as it probably should.