I received $1000 for my first child and $1500 for my second a long while back. Also free childbirth and a post birth stay at the hospital was free. We also got vouchers for a bunch of free things like strollers, cribs, diapers, clothes.
I’m glad they’re still doing this but are focused on more core problems with the structure of daily life realizing that it isn’t just the cost of birth but the future life in totality that is weighing on Koreans deciding to have kids or not.
The benefits are more substantial now. For those interested:
You get:
48.4 million Won (About 37K USD) — 10 million won from the newborn welcome payment, 31.2 million won in basic child allowance (About 200USD a month up to 8 years of age) and 7.2 million won in home-care supplements.
A third child would receive up to 74 million Won (55.5K USD) — 20 million won from the newborn welcome payment, 46.8 million won in basic child allowance and 7.2 million won in home-care supplements.
Next year, vouchers will dissappear and be replaced with cash support:
Child-Welcoming Grant
- 10 million Korean won for the first child, + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 11.2K USD
- 12 million Korean won for the second, + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 12.7K USD
- 15 million Korean won for the third child or more. + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 15K USD
+ Total child allowance = Max 40.5K USD across 12 years. Currently 100,000–120,000 Korean won monthly for children aged 0–8 years old, will increase up to threefold. The government will raise the basic child allowance to 200,000 Korean won monthly starting next year, with 300,000 Korean won for residents of priority regions. If the parent does not use child care facilities between 0 and 1 yo, allance goes up to 500,000 Won or 600,000 Won for priority regions. Age limit also rises every year until 12yo in 2030.
+ one-time marriage support fund of 1 million Korean won
+ To address disparities in economic opportunities based on parental assets, next year, a new **‘Our Child Self-Reliance Support Fund’** will be introduced, enabling children to receive up to 100 million Korean won as seed money upon reaching adulthood. The fund allows parents to invest with government matching contributions (up to 1.2 million Korean won annually based on income, or 16.2K USD) from birth until age 18. Assuming a 5–10% annual return, the fund could yield 60–100 million Korean won at maturity.
+ A couple can also take up to 12 months of leave amounting to an additional ₩39 million (30K USD) of paid leave, if maximized
Maximum central government cash support ~ 72.5K USD + 30K USD paid parental leave + (local subsidies which depend on locality/municipality and whether you have 1,2, or 3 children)
Yes, one of Korea''s birth policy includes late night after-school care. These even provide free tutoring for math, English, and community sports. There are specialized facilities being built to accommodate these activities called Neul-bom Centers (which translates to 'all-day care' Centers), but also public schools, and community businesses partake in this
There's also a 12 month paid parental leave system called the 6+6 parental leave where each parent takes 6 months off. Parents are paid a total up to 39 million KRW or 30K USD.
There's only so far being white will take you if you're ugly, uninteresting, or broke. Whiteness is exotic there but it doesn't render Korean women blind.
Pretty much this us why developed countries have lower birth rates. The daily life of the entire culture hardly includes children anymore. It's fucked.
So I have been looking into the birthrate decline for a little while now, and I think I have at least a partial understanding now. It's going to sound too simple, but even difficult problems can have simple explanations sometimes, and that doesn't mean the solutions are simple.
It's all about the opportunity cost. Very simple. People are having fewer kids because they need or want to do other things.
This is why cash subsidies have had such a limited effect on birthrates. Money is only part of the opportunity cost, time and energy are as well.
The most successful birth rate programs so far address a much more holistic set of needs than just paying money alone does.
Business and family culture play roles too. The business culture must be made more amenable to family life, and this might mean lower productivity from a worker during their family raising years. The family culture also helps, families members in proximity to eachother provide much more support. If you have had to relocate away from a supportive family structure so you could find work, your likelihood of having a family of your own go down a fair bit. So iirc, South Korea had this program to provide cheap homes to young families. If you want those families to get started in the first place, I'd suggest experimenting with helping family groups to move closer together. Don't just give mom, dad, and baby an apartment, but make sure grandma and grandpa are nearby too. They are more than cheap childcare providers, they are sources of experience and emotional comfort for young families, at least when they have healthy relationships. Which brings me to the next point. The culture has to foster healthy child-parent relationships. Idk what the government can do in that regard, but a lot of places seem to be ignoring the correlation in the rate of mental health disturbance and birth rate. I know correlation isn't causation, but it seems worth investigating and I wouldn't be surprised if it is a contributing factor. The role modern tech is playing in this element could be quite significant and I think requires more study as well.
Tl;dr: We got so ravenous for increased productivity, we unknowingly took it at the expense of the cultural and societal pillars that supported the birth rate.
So yeah. The opportunity cost is too high (obvious, right?), just reform the entire culture (simple, no?)
as someone currently raising a child, it is far less about not getting to do what i want and far more about not having to struggle. we would have 3-4 kids by now but we can barely afford necessities with 1. more is out of the picture until pay goes back up and prices go back down. the idea that people are just being selfish about it is boomer level bullshit.
Do the men still have to go drinking with their boss until midnight on weekdays instead of going home to their families? Then low birth rates will continue
Or maybe we’ve drifted away from our “natural tendencies” to reproduce and have short term dopamine hits provided by technological advances.
The short term benefit of swiping and watching a funny TikTok distracts us from our long term benefits of finding a partner and reproducing.
Are we the only animal with declining birth rates? Maybe technology is more of a disease. If we saw a decline in reproduction in any other species surely we would find the cause and label the disease.
Idk if it's sarcastic or not, but that is not the reason. In the us they still have higher birthrates despite all the things that on paper should go against birth rates
The corporate world was structured for men working 50+ hours with few days off in mind. We've tried to squeeze women into this system while society and culture still expect women to have kids and do most of the house work and elder care. It was never going to work.
Improving quality of life could help but doesn't necessarily fix the men vs women war going on right now over there.
Feminism took years to develop in the west but only took Korea a few years. Motherhood went from glorified to demonised in less than a decade.
Also Korean women have some of the lowest rates of children born out of wedlock. Only 5% of kids vs more than 60% in France or the US. So no marriage, no kids.
Birthrates are sinking IMO because people became educated over time about how the world is mostly taped together with hierarchies and violence to maintain the hierarchies. And that’s not fair. It’s realistic, but it’s not fair. And all humans gravitate toward fairness, children and adults alike. Without religious indoctrination or ancient hero stories tricking people into not questioning hierarchies, they’re all revealed as being just plain old unfair. And that disturbs the mind of any sane person. So they keep their future children away from it. These programs help to re-balance the world and sprinkle and teeeeny tiny bit of fairness back in. If people feel like things will be fairer, they’ll be willing to take more “risks”.
I’ve done a bit of reflection on parenthood/birthrates over the past few years, especially seeing peoples’ comments on how their parents were, how birth rates are falling, etc…
I think that the developments in technology over the past century or so that has given humanity more free time (clothes washing machines/dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, etc…) along with the very reasonable bans on child labor have meant that actually raising children responsibly and humanely is much more of a burden than a “gift.”
For most of humanity, children assisted with housework until they were capable enough to join the adults in the factories, mines, and fields. Children weren’t educated for 18+ years while not expected to work and earn a meaningful income. Children’s rights were non-existent (and were often considered property as were women to the head male of the household). Child labor and abuse was expected.
The moment technology freed us from actually needing to parent (stick the child with a phone/tablet all day), parents seemed to jump on that. The moment education became mandatory through secondary school, teachers became the primary parents and biological parents leaned into the toxic “helicopter parents” that refused to both discipline or train their darling gremlins (because of course why would you choose to do something that’s difficult if someone else can/will do that task for you).
Now that children are no longer a legitimate source of household income, and are instead a choice people make just because you feel like it, having children is now essentially a hobby rather than a financial necessity, and it turned out it is not the fun, fulfilling, fashionable hobby we thought it would be.
But people hate this hobby. As soon as school became mandatory, parents shifted more responsibility onto teachers. My parents were both born in the 50s, and both had parents who told them to stay out of the house until dinner was ready. Today, we do the same but with our distraction rectangles. Give a kid an electronic screen and you don’t have to interact with the demonic angle. Child rearing as a hobby isn’t nearly a popular as we’ve been led to believe. These romanticizes notions of parenthood don’t match up with reality, and as soon as child-rearing was turned into a hobby, our birth rates didn’t stand a chance.
What’s more, birth rates in even the most developed, socially generous countries remains paltry. If birth rates were a function of economic prosperity, why doesn’t Finland or Norway have among the highest in the world? Simple: people just don’t like being parents.
Many countries have tried monetary incentivizes to raise birthrates (many of the Nordics, Hungary, South Korea, Singapore among others) and at best it creates a temporary bump in the TFR.
It’s clear that income and TFR are also inversely related.
So, what’s up? What’s the source of declining fertility rates—opportunity cost. Not only is it a financial burden to have children, but as cases like Hungary, Singapore, and SK show, that’s not even the biggest burden. The actual reason why people don’t want children anymore is time. It’s around two decades of your life lost, at a minimum. Your life during your prime adult years in which your entire existence revolves around someone else. Traveling, moving, just being able to be spontaneous with a night out aren’t possible with a child/children. And that’s for at least a decade until the kid is old enough to be left home alone, but there’s still another decade or so where the parents are still tied heavily to their child(ren).
Governments can’t give that freedom and time back to us. Money is only good if someone already wants to be a parent. But it doesn’t solve making people want to be parents.
I don’t think you can say “the actual reason “ because no one knows.
Saying children come at the expense of your “prime years “ has always been the case. That’s just life, but why now is the question. Society’s has become less spiritual/religious so there is a component there that no one speaks about.
Faith and spiritually has been tied to human existence for almost entire history. Only now are we seeing declining birth rates and largely in developed societies who have also grown less religious.
Religiosity is almost guaranteed to have nothing to do with it. Russia, Armenia, Georgia are all very religious countries and all have TFR below replacement levels. Even highly religious countries like Turkey and Iran, much of the Middle East, and Latin America are seeing their TFR decline. Meanwhile irreligious countries like SK, Japan, China, and Singapore saw some of the most impressive population growth in the 20th Century along side some of the most impressive economic growth.
The crux of TFR isn’t about religion nor wealth, it’s time. People don’t want to spend decades of their lives raising children when they could just live their own lives for themselves.
Why now? Because the average income has finally risen enough to allow people to not need children’s income to survive. Because technology has freed up enough time that household chores are no longer full-time jobs in-and-of-themselves. Because technology and and economies of time and scale mean that leisure activities are available to nearly all levels of the income spectrum, not just the elites and gentry class.
This does ignore the real reason why birth rates are declining so much: people aren't getting into stable relationships to even have kids in the first place. Couples who are married are still having children (albeit smaller amounts), but there are fewer and fewer couples.
It’s more fun to surf the internet or play games or watch shows or do outdoor activities than develop a relationship and have children. Relationships can be so difficult.
You can have kids out of wedlock. Happens all of the time. You don’t need to be married to have unprotected sex.
Yes, being married generally leads to families (or at least used to), but let’s not pretend that getting married is the sole reason why people have kids.
The world is simply not setup to be kid friendly. Everything depends on the internet which is a inherently hostile to the mental health and well being of children. Keeping kids off of social media would require parents to maintain a tech-free bubble that would exclude themselves from a tech that's crucial to the rest of society. Meanwhile nobody is willing to regulate the internet on behalf of the welfare of kids.
Oh please kids can find their way around all the safeguards if they wanted to. Especially now with access to AI. Most of the time tho they’re just interested in their games or comics or shows.
adeliberateidler | 8 hours ago
I received $1000 for my first child and $1500 for my second a long while back. Also free childbirth and a post birth stay at the hospital was free. We also got vouchers for a bunch of free things like strollers, cribs, diapers, clothes.
I’m glad they’re still doing this but are focused on more core problems with the structure of daily life realizing that it isn’t just the cost of birth but the future life in totality that is weighing on Koreans deciding to have kids or not.
[OP] rdh2dmd | 8 hours ago
The benefits are more substantial now. For those interested:
You get:
Next year, vouchers will dissappear and be replaced with cash support:
Child-Welcoming Grant
- 10 million Korean won for the first child, + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 11.2K USD
- 12 million Korean won for the second, + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 12.7K USD
- 15 million Korean won for the third child or more. + 5 million for designated priority regions = Up to 15K USD
+ Total child allowance = Max 40.5K USD across 12 years. Currently 100,000–120,000 Korean won monthly for children aged 0–8 years old, will increase up to threefold. The government will raise the basic child allowance to 200,000 Korean won monthly starting next year, with 300,000 Korean won for residents of priority regions. If the parent does not use child care facilities between 0 and 1 yo, allance goes up to 500,000 Won or 600,000 Won for priority regions. Age limit also rises every year until 12yo in 2030.
+ one-time marriage support fund of 1 million Korean won
+ To address disparities in economic opportunities based on parental assets, next year, a new **‘Our Child Self-Reliance Support Fund’** will be introduced, enabling children to receive up to 100 million Korean won as seed money upon reaching adulthood. The fund allows parents to invest with government matching contributions (up to 1.2 million Korean won annually based on income, or 16.2K USD) from birth until age 18. Assuming a 5–10% annual return, the fund could yield 60–100 million Korean won at maturity.
+ A couple can also take up to 12 months of leave amounting to an additional ₩39 million (30K USD) of paid leave, if maximized
Maximum central government cash support ~ 72.5K USD + 30K USD paid parental leave + (local subsidies which depend on locality/municipality and whether you have 1,2, or 3 children)
sourgorilladiesel | 3 hours ago
But what happens when people's working hours are so long they don't have time to raise a child? It goes beyond just income
[OP] rdh2dmd | an hour ago
Yes, one of Korea''s birth policy includes late night after-school care. These even provide free tutoring for math, English, and community sports. There are specialized facilities being built to accommodate these activities called Neul-bom Centers (which translates to 'all-day care' Centers), but also public schools, and community businesses partake in this
There's also a 12 month paid parental leave system called the 6+6 parental leave where each parent takes 6 months off. Parents are paid a total up to 39 million KRW or 30K USD.
No-Temperature-5944 | 8 hours ago
Yowza. As a guy from the US, I will happily immigrate there and father some children. Do they cover travel and moving expenses?.
[OP] rdh2dmd | 8 hours ago
If you meet a Korean girl and rear the child in Korea you'd be eligible.
No-Temperature-5944 | 8 hours ago
Perfect. One last question. Do Korean women have high standards…?
imagine_smell | 8 hours ago
If you are poor and unpopular with women here, you will most likely be poor and unpopular there
No-Temperature-5944 | 6 hours ago
So what you’re saying is, my plan has a flaw?
imagine_smell | 4 hours ago
Well, are you poor and unpopular with women here?
BigNorth69 | 5 hours ago
Not if you’re smart with the incentives
oldsecondhand | 3 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCFB2akLh4s
skoalbrother | 8 hours ago
Obviously
AcanthaceaeOwn1481 | 8 hours ago
ask korean men.
[OP] rdh2dmd | 8 hours ago
Very
ForMoreYears | 6 hours ago
Exceedingly.
WalterWoodiaz | 8 hours ago
Yes, if you are asking this question without doing any research you will not make the cut lol
EnglishBrekkie_1604 | 8 hours ago
If you’re not an arse you’ll probably be all right.
omegachopstick | 5 hours ago
If you are white, Korean women will line up in front of you.
[OP] rdh2dmd | 4 hours ago
You're in for a rude awakening my guy lol. If you're okay settling for someone with undesirable qualities, maybe
Bodoblock | 3 hours ago
There's only so far being white will take you if you're ugly, uninteresting, or broke. Whiteness is exotic there but it doesn't render Korean women blind.
No-Temperature-5944 | 2 hours ago
So, you are also saying my plan has a flaw?
ravenouskit | 7 hours ago
Pretty much this us why developed countries have lower birth rates. The daily life of the entire culture hardly includes children anymore. It's fucked.
ICLazeru | 8 hours ago
So I have been looking into the birthrate decline for a little while now, and I think I have at least a partial understanding now. It's going to sound too simple, but even difficult problems can have simple explanations sometimes, and that doesn't mean the solutions are simple.
It's all about the opportunity cost. Very simple. People are having fewer kids because they need or want to do other things.
This is why cash subsidies have had such a limited effect on birthrates. Money is only part of the opportunity cost, time and energy are as well.
The most successful birth rate programs so far address a much more holistic set of needs than just paying money alone does.
Business and family culture play roles too. The business culture must be made more amenable to family life, and this might mean lower productivity from a worker during their family raising years. The family culture also helps, families members in proximity to eachother provide much more support. If you have had to relocate away from a supportive family structure so you could find work, your likelihood of having a family of your own go down a fair bit. So iirc, South Korea had this program to provide cheap homes to young families. If you want those families to get started in the first place, I'd suggest experimenting with helping family groups to move closer together. Don't just give mom, dad, and baby an apartment, but make sure grandma and grandpa are nearby too. They are more than cheap childcare providers, they are sources of experience and emotional comfort for young families, at least when they have healthy relationships. Which brings me to the next point. The culture has to foster healthy child-parent relationships. Idk what the government can do in that regard, but a lot of places seem to be ignoring the correlation in the rate of mental health disturbance and birth rate. I know correlation isn't causation, but it seems worth investigating and I wouldn't be surprised if it is a contributing factor. The role modern tech is playing in this element could be quite significant and I think requires more study as well.
Tl;dr: We got so ravenous for increased productivity, we unknowingly took it at the expense of the cultural and societal pillars that supported the birth rate.
So yeah. The opportunity cost is too high (obvious, right?), just reform the entire culture (simple, no?)
nbd9000 | 6 hours ago
as someone currently raising a child, it is far less about not getting to do what i want and far more about not having to struggle. we would have 3-4 kids by now but we can barely afford necessities with 1. more is out of the picture until pay goes back up and prices go back down. the idea that people are just being selfish about it is boomer level bullshit.
pandabearak | 7 hours ago
Opportunity cost because they want to… keep a certain quality of life…
So the strategy they are shifting to makes more sense, no?
Puzzle-Necked | 7 hours ago
Do the men still have to go drinking with their boss until midnight on weekdays instead of going home to their families? Then low birth rates will continue
pandabearak | 6 hours ago
Something tells me the working 60-70 hours a week and high cost of everything has more to do with low birth rates than getting drunk with the boss.
gimpwiz | 2 hours ago
It's not either-or
pandabearak | an hour ago
It’s not equal either
FaultRoutine3520 | 5 hours ago
Or maybe we’ve drifted away from our “natural tendencies” to reproduce and have short term dopamine hits provided by technological advances.
The short term benefit of swiping and watching a funny TikTok distracts us from our long term benefits of finding a partner and reproducing.
Are we the only animal with declining birth rates? Maybe technology is more of a disease. If we saw a decline in reproduction in any other species surely we would find the cause and label the disease.
miaomiaomiaomiaomeow | 4 hours ago
Nonsense, birthrates have been low way before smartphones. In italy they dropped below 2 in the late 60s, and in europe as a whole, during the 80s
cantquitreddit | 3 hours ago
The advent of TVs in all homes. And cocaine in the 80s!
miaomiaomiaomiaomeow | an hour ago
Idk if it's sarcastic or not, but that is not the reason. In the us they still have higher birthrates despite all the things that on paper should go against birth rates
FaultRoutine3520 | 4 hours ago
I said technology. More specially computers.
CarFreak777 | 6 hours ago
The corporate world was structured for men working 50+ hours with few days off in mind. We've tried to squeeze women into this system while society and culture still expect women to have kids and do most of the house work and elder care. It was never going to work.
Improving quality of life could help but doesn't necessarily fix the men vs women war going on right now over there.
Feminism took years to develop in the west but only took Korea a few years. Motherhood went from glorified to demonised in less than a decade.
Also Korean women have some of the lowest rates of children born out of wedlock. Only 5% of kids vs more than 60% in France or the US. So no marriage, no kids.
Sirius_Greendown | 7 hours ago
Birthrates are sinking IMO because people became educated over time about how the world is mostly taped together with hierarchies and violence to maintain the hierarchies. And that’s not fair. It’s realistic, but it’s not fair. And all humans gravitate toward fairness, children and adults alike. Without religious indoctrination or ancient hero stories tricking people into not questioning hierarchies, they’re all revealed as being just plain old unfair. And that disturbs the mind of any sane person. So they keep their future children away from it. These programs help to re-balance the world and sprinkle and teeeeny tiny bit of fairness back in. If people feel like things will be fairer, they’ll be willing to take more “risks”.
Super_Mario_Luigi | 7 hours ago
Absolutely wild conspiracy theories
People are having less kids mostly because the conveniences and luxuries of the world are better enjoyed without kids
zedazeni | 6 hours ago
I’ve done a bit of reflection on parenthood/birthrates over the past few years, especially seeing peoples’ comments on how their parents were, how birth rates are falling, etc…
I think that the developments in technology over the past century or so that has given humanity more free time (clothes washing machines/dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, etc…) along with the very reasonable bans on child labor have meant that actually raising children responsibly and humanely is much more of a burden than a “gift.”
For most of humanity, children assisted with housework until they were capable enough to join the adults in the factories, mines, and fields. Children weren’t educated for 18+ years while not expected to work and earn a meaningful income. Children’s rights were non-existent (and were often considered property as were women to the head male of the household). Child labor and abuse was expected.
The moment technology freed us from actually needing to parent (stick the child with a phone/tablet all day), parents seemed to jump on that. The moment education became mandatory through secondary school, teachers became the primary parents and biological parents leaned into the toxic “helicopter parents” that refused to both discipline or train their darling gremlins (because of course why would you choose to do something that’s difficult if someone else can/will do that task for you).
Now that children are no longer a legitimate source of household income, and are instead a choice people make just because you feel like it, having children is now essentially a hobby rather than a financial necessity, and it turned out it is not the fun, fulfilling, fashionable hobby we thought it would be.
But people hate this hobby. As soon as school became mandatory, parents shifted more responsibility onto teachers. My parents were both born in the 50s, and both had parents who told them to stay out of the house until dinner was ready. Today, we do the same but with our distraction rectangles. Give a kid an electronic screen and you don’t have to interact with the demonic angle. Child rearing as a hobby isn’t nearly a popular as we’ve been led to believe. These romanticizes notions of parenthood don’t match up with reality, and as soon as child-rearing was turned into a hobby, our birth rates didn’t stand a chance.
What’s more, birth rates in even the most developed, socially generous countries remains paltry. If birth rates were a function of economic prosperity, why doesn’t Finland or Norway have among the highest in the world? Simple: people just don’t like being parents.
FaultRoutine3520 | 5 hours ago
Interesting take.
I don’t know if I necessarily agree, but I can see your point.
zedazeni | 5 hours ago
Many countries have tried monetary incentivizes to raise birthrates (many of the Nordics, Hungary, South Korea, Singapore among others) and at best it creates a temporary bump in the TFR.
It’s clear that income and TFR are also inversely related.
So, what’s up? What’s the source of declining fertility rates—opportunity cost. Not only is it a financial burden to have children, but as cases like Hungary, Singapore, and SK show, that’s not even the biggest burden. The actual reason why people don’t want children anymore is time. It’s around two decades of your life lost, at a minimum. Your life during your prime adult years in which your entire existence revolves around someone else. Traveling, moving, just being able to be spontaneous with a night out aren’t possible with a child/children. And that’s for at least a decade until the kid is old enough to be left home alone, but there’s still another decade or so where the parents are still tied heavily to their child(ren).
Governments can’t give that freedom and time back to us. Money is only good if someone already wants to be a parent. But it doesn’t solve making people want to be parents.
FaultRoutine3520 | 3 hours ago
I don’t think you can say “the actual reason “ because no one knows.
Saying children come at the expense of your “prime years “ has always been the case. That’s just life, but why now is the question. Society’s has become less spiritual/religious so there is a component there that no one speaks about.
Faith and spiritually has been tied to human existence for almost entire history. Only now are we seeing declining birth rates and largely in developed societies who have also grown less religious.
zedazeni | 3 hours ago
Religiosity is almost guaranteed to have nothing to do with it. Russia, Armenia, Georgia are all very religious countries and all have TFR below replacement levels. Even highly religious countries like Turkey and Iran, much of the Middle East, and Latin America are seeing their TFR decline. Meanwhile irreligious countries like SK, Japan, China, and Singapore saw some of the most impressive population growth in the 20th Century along side some of the most impressive economic growth.
The crux of TFR isn’t about religion nor wealth, it’s time. People don’t want to spend decades of their lives raising children when they could just live their own lives for themselves.
Why now? Because the average income has finally risen enough to allow people to not need children’s income to survive. Because technology has freed up enough time that household chores are no longer full-time jobs in-and-of-themselves. Because technology and and economies of time and scale mean that leisure activities are available to nearly all levels of the income spectrum, not just the elites and gentry class.
FaultRoutine3520 | 3 hours ago
So you’ve solved it…. lol where’s the research paper?
Purple-Food-9829 | 2 hours ago
What’s your opinion on the matter if you disagree?
some_where_else | 2 hours ago
> because no one knows.
research has indicated that the fall in birthrates correlates strongly everywhere with women having the choice.
bloodrider1914 | 6 hours ago
This does ignore the real reason why birth rates are declining so much: people aren't getting into stable relationships to even have kids in the first place. Couples who are married are still having children (albeit smaller amounts), but there are fewer and fewer couples.
Dazzling-Rub-8550 | 5 hours ago
It’s more fun to surf the internet or play games or watch shows or do outdoor activities than develop a relationship and have children. Relationships can be so difficult.
zedazeni | 5 hours ago
You can have kids out of wedlock. Happens all of the time. You don’t need to be married to have unprotected sex.
Yes, being married generally leads to families (or at least used to), but let’s not pretend that getting married is the sole reason why people have kids.
WEAluka | 3 hours ago
We are talking about South Korea here. Kids out of wedlock is significantly rarer in East Asia.
x_xwolf | 3 hours ago
When population booms?
looks at chart sees … economic boom
When population busts?
MUST BE THE WOMENZ AND THE TECHNOLOGY
GoppleSmanger | 6 hours ago
The world is simply not setup to be kid friendly. Everything depends on the internet which is a inherently hostile to the mental health and well being of children. Keeping kids off of social media would require parents to maintain a tech-free bubble that would exclude themselves from a tech that's crucial to the rest of society. Meanwhile nobody is willing to regulate the internet on behalf of the welfare of kids.
Dazzling-Rub-8550 | 5 hours ago
Oh please kids can find their way around all the safeguards if they wanted to. Especially now with access to AI. Most of the time tho they’re just interested in their games or comics or shows.
GoppleSmanger | 5 hours ago
Which is my point. The internet is simply hostile to children's mental health noone is willing to change it.