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by throwaway03635
1016 days ago
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> One typical response is that we should simply subsidize those childcare programs. Fair enough, but the countries that have taken this idea the farthest -- the Nordics -- have still not achieved replacement-level fertility. Childcare is built around taking care of the kids only when their parents are at work. When they parents comes home from work, they have to find time to take care of the household chores (dinner, cleaning) in addition to taking care of the child's needs. Today's societies put a lot of pressure on parents that were not there before. Nobody want's their child to be a loser, so they have to follow up on homework and after school activities. The pressure is much higher than 20-30 years ago, and many opt out. Childcare programs in the Nordic are a necessary first step, but they only cover working hours. We either need to reduce social pressures that forces parents to push their children to be "perfect", or just face the fact that we need to pay for organizing the after school activities (no more volunteer work at the soccer clubs or driving kids to swimming practice). This will make sure that the parents can focus on spending quality time with their kids and still have time for a personal life. |
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In the past, many of those duties would be distributed throughout a community. And on isolated farms, parents would intentionally have big families so that the eldest could help raise the younger kids.
Doing it all with two people is a huge burden. Doing it with just one is a heroic act. Throwing in the extra burdens and expectations of the upper-middle class professional world -- homework help, extracurriculars, etc -- makes it virtually impossible.
So it makes sense that only the 500k+ income crowd is having big families. That's probably a good approximation of the income required to afford the total cost of replacing all of the childcare benefits of an informal community with paid labor.