These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
I think you’d agree that there is a stark difference between “babysitting your one sister” and “babysitting 8(!!) Children”. Yet, the comment I replied to just said broadly “letting one sibling babysit will traumatize that child and they will hate their parents” which I refuted as not being the universal truth the comment made it out to be. “Don’t cover your toddler’s nose” or “don’t let a toddler’s head fall back or forwards” are such truths. “Babysitting leads to resentment of parents” isn’t.
Also, babysitting and “caring for” are different things. While I absolutely agree that you should not be in a parenting role as sibling and being responsible for the upbringing of your younger siblings, babysitting usually means “watch for a few hours and keep the status quo so the child doesn’t starve or kill itself while the parents are away”, nothing more.
Besides, you closed your reply implying that I’m the outlier here because my experiences aren’t doing what would happen in “an average home”. Now don’t get.me wrong here but isn’t my home a little more average than your’s? Like… Going by the numbers in the very post above.
It’s funny, i thought the exact opposite; your comment was saying that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, and the comment you replied to was obviously saying that kids baysitting kids is a bad habit to get into, but not terrible in moderation.
I am well aware that my family situation is an outlier, i just understood your comment to mean that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, so one counter example was enough to make my point, which was that you need to be careful about choosing to have enough kids so they can ‘parent themselves’.
Yeah, my last sentence sounds wrong in hindsight. Should have said “That is just not a traumatic thing to me at all” or "That was not a traumatic thing at all.
I absolutely agree that a line should be drawn where you expect children to prematurely… well… mature and be parents/adults.
In my case, I was 12 or so and my sister was 6, so we both came home from school and were alone until our parents got home from work. They never expected me to make her do things or something. When we hadn’t done our homework when they got home, the consequence was that the homework needed to be done still and we couldn’t go out and play. That’s it. My job was to make sure my sister got a warm meal (reheated; pre-cooked by my parents) and basically didn’T die. They asked us to do certain things while they were away (vacuum the living room or something) but they never really made a fuss when we failed to do it. They just made us do it later then.