I've had a similar thought: we've made societies where nothing gets done without paying for it, and where it's financially incredibly hard to be a parent without both parents working near 100%. Yet having kids is basically an essential service to society. With most things in our economy, we don't expect things to happen without paying for it. So why do we expect parents to do free labor, taking from whatever extremely limited free time they have left to raise kids? Is it really that surprising that people aren't having kids?
When women was expected to stay at home and manage the house and raise kids, you essentially had a lot of dedicated labor to raise kids. They weren't paid, but the wages and the costs in society was such that the father could support the family on his wage alone. We need to realize that if you want someone to raise 5+ kids (which is a necessity if some people have 0 kids), that's really a full time job until all the kids are of school age, and it should be paid as such. Obviously, we shouldn't return to what we had before. We should pay the parent directly instead of it going through the husband, and in todays society it can be either mom or dad that stays home.
People I know who started family's around the same time but were in the later 30s or early 40s seem more likely to have grown a larger family.
I suspect in five years time when the statistics for this "cohort" (30s now) stabilises we will see a significant drop multi child families.
And in countries with social safety nets, workers pay to support other, retiring workers. With increasing lifespans, sharply decreasing numbers of workers, and relatively early retirement ages… the wheels are going to fall right off the train, unless robots save us.
We don't need robots, we need guillotines.
Is that entirely private? Are there no public child care options?
I think it's hard to appreciate just how hollowed out the UK public service has become, yet we still pay a decent amount of tax relative to other OECD countries.
State pensions in the UK are very low to start with. If they don't at least keep up with inflation many elderly will end up destitute (and cost even more to the NHS...).
It is interesting how birth rate ties into their whole economic picture -- after multi-decade deflation, they're still sitting at well under 3% unemployment, and a poverty rate only slightly higher than the United States. Prices may be falling, but apparently, when your population is simultaneously shrinking at such a rapid pace, it's less painful than you'd expect on the average household economically speaking.
Not at all. Almost everything is privatized today. When children reach adulthood, the economic benefits that they create also go to the private sector. 'Small government' in the West meant that the government being pushed out of every sector from education to healthcare and private profiteers taking their place. And as private players, their objective is to maximize their profit.
So even child raising became a thing that requires ever-increasing amount of effort and cost from parents as the profit margins rose. Japan got hit before other Western countries and got hit harder because it already had a 'work or die' culture that required 100% from the employees. To have children, you had to put 120%. And when the private sector's increasing fees made it require putting in 200%, the youth just stopped trying...
I use to chat with my friends and all their plans for life are literally "I'll do this when/if I have the money".
That's it.
My life (have two children and my wife was at home for 4 years) instead, the moment my first child was born has been: figure out life insurance so that your kids are safe if you die, figure out income for retirement to avoid weighting on your children, figure out savings necessary to pay for education, figure out housing because you will need 3 bedrooms and rent keeps going up.
I had to really take ownership of my finances. Amazing, I learned a lot, but government support is nowhere it should be for somebody that greatly contribute to society.
The costs (time, money) of raising children are significantly privatised but the economic benefits once they reach adulthood tend to flow to government and society at large.
In the past, many parents expected to receive direct economic benefits from the labour of their children. Children were expected to e.g. contribute on the farm.
In countries without social safety nets, younger generations are expected to directly support older famility members.
Having kids used to be something with pretty direct economic benefits, it's now expected to be a somewhat more altruistic enterprise.