[abathur]

Thought exercise: functionally speaking, how similar is ~compromising the quality of high-school sex education (i.e., getting rid of it, making it elective, giving parents any control or veto over the curriculum, converting it to an abstinence-only curriculum, ensuring it's taught by prudes, etc.) to rolling back access to birth control?

(Edit: not really directed at parent poster. Just something you made me think of...)

[DoingIsLearning]

I am all for thought experiments but this discussion is fairly disturbing.

How about:

- 12 month parental leave for fathers and mothers

- 20 days minimum payed holiday

- paid sick leave

- Free childcare

- Insurance covered 15 days assistance at home post partum with a post-natal caregiver

- Child stipends up to the age of 18 years old

None of this is ground breaking in many developed countries.

So much work yet to do in implementing pro-child policies and yet your first step is entrapping teenagers into a pregnancy and a lifelong commitment?

[vladvasiliu]

Not sure how long parental leave we have, but here in France most [0] of your other points are available, yet birth rate has still been below replacement for 20 years [1]. So something else may be going on.

[0] While childcare is technically free, my understanding is that, in practice, places are limited, especially in big cities.

[1] https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/512101/nombre-enfants-p...

[newaccount74]

Same in Austria. Theoretically we have very affordable childcare. But in cities there are too few places, so only a small fraction of parents can actually use them. On the country side opening times of childcare are so limited that they are incompatible with most jobs (childcare Mo-Fri 8-12 is better than nothing, but there are very few jobs that are compatible with those times).

The result is that most mothers pause their careers while the kids are small. The consequence is that most couples only have one or two kids.

[ajnin]

Childcare is not free in France, it is subsidized but parents pay in proportion of their resources.

[arrozconcosas]

There is no correlation in practice between these benefits and greater birth rates. Countries with some of the most friendly policies to parenting have the lowest birth rates. In the past, people with much more difficult lives had many more children. This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world.

[beiller]

Quick google for France shows 1.83 births per woman vs USA's 1.64. So maybe there is a correlation.

[nightski]

That's going to be very rough on small business. I think it all sounds fantastic don't get me wrong, but most mom and pop shops can't float employees for 12 months while paying in full for their child care and other services.

[scotty79]

It's usually mostly tax funded

[bzzzt]

That's why we pay taxes in the EU...

[Maakuth]

This is basically what Finland does, but it doesn't seem to result into larger baby count. These are very humane policies and I'm all for them but they don't solve this particular problem.

[saiya-jin]

I think the aim is rather to raise few well-balanced kids who are taken care of by professionals so parents' work is not FUBAR. Motivating modern parents to have >2 kids takes a bit more than that.

The simple fact is, parenting these days is effin' hard. Even if you have place to put your kids in 5 days a week. I mean hellishly hard for few years, people go very close to mental breakdown regularly, or sometimes quite deep into it - seeing it a bit around us.

The bar to call yourself a good parent ain't about kids simply surviving. We know that ignoring child's cries whole night, every night messes them up badly for later life. Day naps effectively ruin your weekends. Diapers, fights for toys, lack of sleep which alone will fuck up most people badly but here we talk about all of this and much more, for years, while work doesn't wait. No help there.

The fact is, most folks simply have enough after 2 kids, we sure as hell do. There is very little additional 'parenting satisfaction' after 2 kids, yet costs and stress mounts. Also seeing quite a bit of fertility issues after first child around us, but that's not what people like to talk about.

[Maakuth]

I think you are onto something, although we've got three :). Raising well-balanced kids, who then become well-balanced adults isn't for nothing of course, but it's way harder to measure than the raw count of babies.

[abathur]

You seem to be imagining that I support the undermining of sex-ed. I am merely pointing to the dots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_education_in_the_United_...

[lovich]

Oof, each one of those sounds like it might cost more than 10 dollars, much less all together.

Guess I’m going to vote for going with the dystopian choices or the more palatable one of sticking our heads in the sand and not deal with the problem until it’s a catastrophe

[rendall]

I suspect that the decline in birth rates in developed nations have to do with raised expectations. The amount of resources and time that parents are expected to devote to each child are quite high.