1. Having children without being married has a bunch of problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished for it in lack of certain social services
2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects as bad as or worse than in the US.
3. Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. The subsidies people get in Asia hardly even make up for the cost of a c-section. Sure the same might be true for the USA, but we know it's not a good place to compare things to. But birth and housing are also a fraction of the long term pain of raising a child in those societies.
Other people have mentioned dating. I think modern societies in general have had a break down in social structures, where people used to get their partners from.
This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws, but for the most part, school placement is usually based on geographical location (which comes with its own set of problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and more importantly those college exams can be retaken multiple times a year.
East Asian education is extremely competitive with competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3). Japanese media often shows how students get their grades ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test, Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want to retest you have to wait the whole year.
And then there is the problem of school bullying: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-ove...
> “A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,” she said. “Some would even blame the victims, saying that it is their problem that they cannot fit in.”
> Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was forced to move to another area.
The one difference I have noticed is that some of those Asian countries are more extreme in that more people choose to not have kids and more people choose to have only one kid instead of two.
I didn't get into any of my Ivy first choices and ended up going to a mid-tier state school and still wound up living well, except without the massive private debt burdens of my peers.
This is different from South Korea or most of East Asia. South Korea's unemployment rate among graduates is pretty high and underemployment even higher, because the system is producing too many university graduates. From Wikipedia:
> As of 2007, 80% of college graduates were job seekers while only 30% of jobs demand highly educated workers.[7] With the recent overabundance of high school and college graduates,[8] the requirements of the labor market mismatch the skills provided by the education system.
Also, our big cities have evolved to serve adults vs children. We have a proliferation of services for adults: sit in restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, etc… Just look at turnstiles to the subway and the stairs you need to ascend/descend. Good luck trying to push strollers or drag children around in our urban areas.
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, looks like Korea has a year, just split into maternity and parental, and Japan has a year off for both mother and father, although the father seldom takes it. Which countries are comparable to the US?
I see 90 days. 60 paid full and if its anything like other Asian countries there a pretty low limit for the partial paid part. Maybe you can take a year but you will almost certainly not keep your job afterwards. I guess 45 days after birth is much better than most US jurisdictions.
If the father does get it and doesn’t take it it will most certainly also be because of fear of punishment down the road.
And funny you should say Japan, because from what I hear most people wouldn’t dare take time off.
Maternity leave is 90 days( Article 74 (Protection of Pregnant Women and Nursing Mothers [0]), paternity leave is actually 10 days( Article 18-2 Paternity Leave [1]).
What you're referring to is CHAPTER III-2 assistance for work-family balance. And it only applies "provided, That this shall not apply to cases prescribed by Presidential Decree, such as where it is impossible to employ his or her substitute or where the normal operation of business is significantly impeded"[1]. The burden of proof like always is on the employee.
And while you can't get fired during(provided the presidential decree doesn't apply to you), the employee may still try to get rid of you after you did it. But this also needs explaining that people in South Korea oftentimes stay with their employer a lifetime, that 1 year maybe chosen across 8 years of the Childs birth, and it's unlikely that in Asian culture someone will dare taking it in the first year of their employment.
[0] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_service/lawView.do?hseq=25437&la...
[1] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/kor_service/lawView.do?lang=ENG&hseq...
It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on.
It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).
At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.
It is pretty hard to find though. It seems people want either hot casual sex or a house in the suburbs within 6 months, not much in between.
1. Yes, obviously Japan housing prices have fallen from their insane 90s peak, but housing is still very expensive in Japan, and especially in urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live, space is famously at a premium.
2. I can barely count the number of times I've read articles on the reasons Japanese women don't want to get married. Unlike some Western nations, there is still a cultural expectation in Japan that women do a ton of housework and childrearing with little help from men, to the point that famously elaborate childrens' bento boxes are a source of stress. Many Japanese women with careers easily see marriage as a net negative, obviously different than decades past.
2. The reasons you listed are completely different from the one I responded to, and these are certainly potential factors. At least they’re often considered reasonable suspects in Japan.
Not "most" people live in where housing price is rising. Foreigners tend to see only metropolis. There are many people living non rural (some are urban? but having car is good) area but affordable housing price.
One way to fix it is the government deciding to highly encourage 'old-fashioned' social norms.
For example, we could have single-sex spaces, which help the sexes develop unique cultures that they then have to rely on each other for.
Or we could encourage single-income-earning, realizing more men are going to take advantage of this, and encourage more stay-at-home parenting, realizing that more women will take advantage of this (but by no means should the sex of either role be forced).
Or, we could change sex-ed curricula to focus more broadly on family formation and its importance.
Encourage church membership, since that used to constitute a large portion of the dating pool, and makes it easier for people to find others like them.
Idolize the roles of mothers and fathers and how it's a national duty.
There's lots of ways to fix it. The willpower simply isn't there. Of course, many people are in complete denial as to the root causes too. The truth is sexual attraction is fundamentally based on sexual difference. Save for a slim minority of the population, this is true across the board (yes, even in homosexual relationships). The reason why dating sucks and people can't find partners is because we've attempted to eradicate all sexual difference, but every once in a while human nature overpowers even this, and we see phenomena which our current culture cannot explain but is easily explainable in the larger context of the human condition (for example, the popularity of 50 shades of grey amongst women, or the popularity of 'seduction culture' and the manosphere amongst men).
You talk about 'knowing your place in society' as if that's a bad thing. A lot of social problems today descend from the fact that large portions of the population have no place in society.
The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life.