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.
So? You want to have kids then have kids. No one is saying kids should be forbidden. What I’m saying is that a lot of people decide to have kids when they don’t have enough time and money for it and have lousy experience. And a lot (and like really really a lot) of people are simply bad at parenting and their kids also have lousy experience. You were lucky to have the resources and skills to raise your kids right. Good for you. Problem is that when you say ‘kids and fantastic’ a lot of people think they are fantastic for everyone. We should be saying ‘kids are fantastic if you have the resources, time and skills needed to take care of them properly’ instead. The ‘why don’t you have kids? kids are fantastic!’ attitude that’s the problem. It makes people think they are missing out on something great when they don’t have them and puts a lot of needles pressure on couples. Having kids shouldn’t be the default, it should be an option for the right people.