How do you fix it? Any way you look at it, the person spending 12 hours a day every day sharpening their skills is going to have a much higher income on average than the person that spends their time raising kids.

Same as any quality of life improvement program: You tax people and use the money to make things better for society.

Reminds me of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Living myself in Switzerland, married with a mother who stayed at home during the first 15 years of parentship, I can tell you we solved this without the government, we solved it as a team.

Just like we solved all our private matters.

The one thing we love about this country is that people here do NOT see tax as a solution to all. As a matter of fact, since this is a country with direct democracy, if we'd feel tax would be the solution we could initiate a referendum and solve that within months.

Why do i have to help pay for your choice to have kids? I dont like kids. I like fish. Will you help pay for my aquarium?

Because that's how it works to be part of a society. You sacrifice some of your work to raise the quality of life of everyone.

Roads, parks, power lines, communications cables, police, welfare, healthcare, sewage, electricity, clean water, healthy food, safe consumer products, clean environment, justice, protection for the vulnerable, duck wetlands, women's shelters, protection of creative works... These all cost money, and you pay for them with your taxes. Not everything goes equally to everyone, and not everything benefits everyone (by necessity), but the aggregate benefit is huge.

The point of taxes is to pay for things that benefit society as a whole. Having children, especially in high income countries, is not only important but also extremely necessary. I don't like children either but I also don't want to be the last generation to inhabit the planet. And it's important that children have support early in life to be successful.

It you’re concerned about fairness, the “salary” received during the maternity leave should no be related to the employment you’re taking leave from (not even to the fact of being or not employed).