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.
He also indirectly told me how my parents “should have” handled the situation. No knowledge on what was on, nothing. But a “uhm, you know that your parents were wrong, don’tcha?”
I’m a freshly baked father myself and have noticed how easily many people just blame parents with wholesale statements and without the slightest bit of knowledge about how being a parent is and how raising a child actually works, yet everybody claims to be an expert.
I think we need to clear something up here. The term in question was “babysitting” not “raising”. Just as I would not expect someone to “raise my children” when I hired a babysitter, why would that term be different when siblings do it?
I was 12, my sister was 6 and we were home alone after school until my parents came home from work. That’s “babysitting” to me.
The fact that ppl just assumed I meant something completely different and started the judgement train speaks for itself.
I apologize for offending you, but your earlier comment seemed to imply that a child should reasonably share a parents responsibility of their children.