Please have more babies (Please come back to work)
My native South Korea is lowest in the world in something it does not want to be: birth rate. At 0.78 births per woman, it is well short of the 2.1 births needed to maintain a population.
The grim statistics have everyone wringing their hands, since it is plain to see that a country whose population is declining will itself eventually decline. For a nation to be long term viable, consistent numbers of robust people are needed to provide services, create goods, and be consumers -- to drive economies forward perpetually. In China, Japan, and South Korea, where the recent birth rates have been 1.18, 1.3, and 0.78, each nation's tremendous economic growth of the past few decades could be reversed just as quickly as it came. (In addition to Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan the other so-called "Asian Tigers" have birth rates hovering around 1.)
There has been a lot of ink spilled over this problem, much of it being redundant analysis or ineffective policy:
Variations of "Educated women don't have kids." Yes. Educated women everywhere also expand economic output though, so it's a double-edged sword. Studying the reverse correlation between women's educational and professional attainment and national birth rate is useful for research, but of limited practical use. (Unless we want to press a magic button to return to 1950, where the birth rate was higher but economic output was lower.) We need to solve the problem that is here now, within current realities. And to spell out the problem and the reality, the problem is the birth rate and the reality is that modern women are educated and can work outside of the home. However, in Korea, the birth rate is falling AND the rate of participation of women in the workforce is low.
"Let's give women money to have more kids." There are government programs cropping up across multiple countries that aim to lessen the financial impact of having a child. In South Korea: In 2023, the Ministry of Health and Welfare raised the monthly cash payment to households with an infant under 12 months to 700,000 won ($540), and a baby 13-23 months to 350,000 won. In 2024, the monthly cash payout will be incrementally raised again, to 1 million won and 500,000 won, respectively.
This government spending feels like a lot of aggregate funds to the lawmakers doling it out -- and it is. But the program is not new as of 2023; it's an increase from the more modest program it supplanted. Meanwhile, the birth rate continues to decline. The relatively modest contribution to the household budget is not changing many minds about having a child or another child, and is not improving the rate of women's participation in the workforce.
What will?
It’s important to note first that the declining birth rate has been playing out across generations. It didn’t begin in the current generation of child bearing women. But population level analysis is impersonal. So let's take my own family as an example. Since birth rate calculations are done with women as the denominator, I’ll use my matrilineal line.
My mother's mother had, with her former husband, three daughters. Her birth rate was 3.0. All three daughters married, and had two, one, and two children each. So three women then produced five grandchildren, for a birth rate of 1.67. Already, the population replacement level has been compromised.
The birth rate becomes more challenged in my generation. Of those five grandchildren, four are women and all are of childbearing age. There's a huge variance among us. I'm the eldest, married, and in the midst of having my third. The next oldest is also married, has one, and is not inclined to have another. The other two women grands are unmarried and not inclined to have children outside of marriage. That brings us to four women producing (so far) four children (almost), for a birth rate of 1.00.
From 3 to 1.67 to 1. Our birth trend mirrors the national one. If we had had one fewer child in my generation, the birth rate would be 0.75, almost exactly the national birth rate. If we have one more child, our birth rate will be 1.25. If two more are born, 1.5. In order to bring this group to the sustaining level of 2.1, the four of us women would need to have four plus more children.
Four is a lot, particularly considering that I will soon be outside of childbearing age, and I don't see my married cousin having one more child, much less four. Maybe the two younger women will marry and embark on their motherhood journeys, as the two elder ones have? But Korea, like other countries with low birth rates, also has a low rate of marriage, and I foresee no imminent weddings in this branch of my family. Korea also deeply frowns on women who have children outside of marriage, and I don't foresee the two younger women becoming single moms either.
Still, I am thinking that a 1.25 birthrate is better than 1, is better than 0.78. And the most straightforward way to achieve this incremental improvement seems, to me, to convince the people with one child to have another. To bring the challenge closer to home:
How can we convince my cousin to have one more child? (The answer is definitely not $540 or even $770 a month.)
Let’s zoom back up to the population level.
In my travels, and in speaking with various one-child moms in Korea, several themes emerge as to why a second child is not in the future for each woman:
“It’s too expensive to raise a child in Korea.” The particular category of expense that is most daunting is education. Koreans spend the most per capita in the world on supplemental education. Tutoring, extracurriculars, sports, and so on. There’s a fundamental perception that drives the top end of this spending, which is that if parents don’t spend, their child will fall behind. “Fall behind” in spending, certainly, but frankly, it is not entirely clear in the long run what falling behind means, and the question is not explicitly asked or answered.
A second key category of expense, for the upper crust, is luxury. Well-to-do children clad in Moncler and Fendi are a common sight in Korea, setting the stage for middle class parents to feel peer pressured into buying designer duds for their one child as well. It, too, seems fueled by a fear of falling behind – perhaps in status. Mothers express worries about their children being treated differently by nursery school teachers if they don’t dress them in high end fashion. As eyebrow raising as such fears may be, they are real.
“It’s too exhausting to raise another child in Korea.” Modern societies everywhere have seen the decline of collectivism, but in a densely populated place such as greater Seoul, this decline feels surprising. Like in the US or Western Europe, extended families do not live together anymore. In addition, it’s also common to not know one’s neighbors who live on the same floor in a condo building. Among this densely packed group of strangers or nodding relations, there is little to no chance of neighbors helping neighbors. The thought of having your child go play at your neighbor’s house while you run errands is unimaginable for most. Parents are largely on their own, or left to find ad hoc support – paid or unpaid.
Paid support is both expensive and not continuous. While the Korean government provides for nationally subsidized day cares, they run at strict times. Moreover, sick children are understandably not allowed. Individual child care is not a well developed industry in Korea. Nannying is not a profession, and part-time sitters, while available, are not available in the way that a live-in grandmother or a nice set of neighboring aunties are available. Sitters who are perfect strangers are also difficult to vet, another problem of the decline in collectivist society.
And finally, public school hours are baffling. First grade ends at lunch for a time, creating irregularly timed child care needs that are difficult to fulfill, and making it nearly impossible to have a job outside of the home. The public day care system and the public educational system provide valuable services. But relative to the real needs of families, the overall structure seems designed to ensure that being a mother of one child is a full-time endeavor for at least the first seven years.
“I don’t want to go through the pregnancy, birth, and post-partum experience.” I have always marveled at women who say that they enjoy being pregnant. Each time I have been pregnant I have been to some degree miserable, not to mention the horror of childbirth and the grueling post-partum recovery process. It is, guaranteed, at least one full year of physical difficulty borne exclusively by the woman. As having a child is biologically restricted to women, I have sympathy for women who just don’t want to do it again. Especially if the first time was awful, which – for many reasons including the myriad problematic ways childbirth is commonly handled by medical staff – is often true.
Note: The best illustration of these realities that I have seen is in the book turned movie "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982".
These are not issues that are solved by $770 a month.
These are issues pertinent to the current generation of women in their fertile years. But given that the larger falloff in birth rate occurred in the previous generation, the question is why that decline occurred. The Korean birth rate when my mother was born was 6.2. After peaking the next year, a precipitous straight line decline brought down the birth rate to 1.57 in the year after my sister was born. Nobody asks the question of wherefore this decline. And yet I cannot help but think that the more important answers to the declines in birth rates lie with the men and women of between my grandmother’s generation and my mother’s, whether in Korea or anywhere birth rate has declined – i.e., every modern country.
Ironically, most Koreans I have spoken to in my mother’s generation hold the narrative that “this generation isn’t having children.” The reality is that that generation brought the country below the population replacement level before mine got started, and brought down the rate even further, to today’s 0.78
Clearly it’s too late for my mother and her sisters to have more children. Neither will this problem be solved by trying to induce my generation of women to make up for two previous generations of lost time. Frankly, the simplest solution to today’s child care needs would be for my mother’s generation of women to volunteer to care for their grandchildren, full time. Yet I don’t think it is fair to ask them to, and I doubt most would agree if asked. Even if they did agree, it would stand to reason that the gains would only restore the birth rate to 1.5 or so, based on historical data.
(It is worth noting here: I do expect the birth rate in East Asia to bump upward next year, for an entirely esoteric reason: 2024 is the year of the Dragon in the Lunar calendar. So there will likely be an increase in births timed to that year, as parents hope to birth a desirable Dragon, followed perhaps by some misattribution of said gains to government policies, followed in 2025 by a decline to 2023 levels.)
Building societies is the ultimate collectivist challenge, and evidence suggests that neither Korea or any modern country is up to the challenge. Even in Northern Europe, whose countries are internationally held up to be superior in the socialist sense, the birth rate is well short of replacement level: 1.5 +/- 0.25. If no modern global people can achieve population replacement, even in the “best” of societies, doesn’t it simply mean that modern men and women prefer to have fewer children, and that birth rate is, necessarily, a casualty of modernity?