Posted on 12/07/2023 8:47:27 PM PST by Morgana
Around the world, nations are creating incentives to get citizens to have more children, but their strategies don’t appear to be working. Vox claims, “You can’t even pay people to have more kids.” But are people choosing not to have children because they don’t want them, or do they not want what they’ve been conditioned to believe children are?
Vox reports that Taiwan has spent more than $3 billion trying to convince its citizens to have more children. That includes the addition of six months of paid parental leave reimbursed at 80% of the parent’s salary, as well as a cash benefit and a tax break for parents of young children.
In Hungary, if a woman has four or more children she is no longer required to pay income tax — for the rest of her life. The nation also gives a loan of about $30,000 to newlyweds. If they have three or more children, the loan is forgiven. Hungary’s 2023 birth rate increased by about 0.65% from 2022.
In Italy, parliament passed “The Family Act” in 2020 which is aimed at giving a universal monthly allowance to families from the seventh month of pregnancy until the child turns 18. Families will get up to €175/$189 per month for the first and second child, and €260/$280 a month for any further children depending on the family income. Regardless, in Italy, the birth rate is expected to hit a new record low in 2023.
An initiative was launched in Poland last year called the Family Welfare Capital program. It gives parents 12,000 zloty (€2,610/$2,947) for each child after their firstborn between the ages of 12 and 36 months. All families, regardless of income, will receive the money. Initially, Poland had offered would-be parents monthly payments beginning in 2015 if they had children. Following that decision, birth rates began to rise before falling back down within four years.
Likewise, Austria has extended its maternity leave to more than two years, Russia began offering families with two or more children a lump sum of $7,000, and Greece began handing out “baby bonuses.”
Yet, said Vox, “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.”
Trent MacNamara, a history professor at Texas A&M, told Vox, “Even the richest, savviest, most committed governments have struggled to find policies that produce sustained bumps in fertility. If such policies were discoverable, I think someone would have discovered them.”
The devaluing of children
It may not necessarily be that people don’t want children, but the false negative image that has been portrayed of children. One example: in 2017, Phil Daoust, a father and stepfather, penned an article for The Guardian entitled, “Why are children so annoying?”
Daoust listed 60 reasons ranging from “Because they cry when you brush their hair” and “Because they turn you into a horrible, bitter grump” to “Because you can’t have sex till they’re asleep” and “Because they won’t shut up.” He also argues that after all the time and money parents spend on children, children eventually grow up and hate their parents.
To some, it may seem like one big joke, but these negative views of children along with a heavy focus on “self” have had a lasting impact.
Beyond this faulty perception of children, adults consider children to be a drain on parents’ finances and freedoms. Rather than having children, young adults are getting dogs and spending their time and money on travel.
Climate change
Children are also considered a threat to the environment — as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. In addition to being tentative about having children due to the so-called “burdens of capitalism,” she and other adults her age are worried about climate change.
In 2021, The Independent featured an article by Kate Ng, who examined whether or not it’s environmentally responsible to have children. “The first academic study of the issue last year found that an overwhelming number of people who are concerned about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children over fears their next of kin would struggle in the future,” she said.
It’s two-fold reasoning when it comes to the climate. Adults don’t want to birth children into a world in which they foresee a “climate apocalypse,” but also perceive children to be a drain on resources and a hazard to the environment. Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle were named environmental “role models” by UK-based organization Population Matters because of their plan to have a “maximum” of two children to reduce the impact on the planet.
Having fewer children or no children at all is becoming the norm due to “role models” like this.
Even those who view children in a positive light do not plan on having children due to concerns for the planet. In a study published in the journal Climatic Change, a 31-year-old woman explained, “Climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children. I don’t want to birth children into a dying world [though] I dearly want to be a mother.”
However, it’s underpopulation that’s causing concern.
David Brooks explained for The New York Times, “For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource.”
Children, he said, “are the most important resource any country can have. The world does not need fewer children.”
Unfortunately, once an idea takes hold, no matter how misguided it is, it can be difficult if not impossible to shake. China enacted its One-Child Policy in 1980. It replaced it with a two-child policy in 2016 due to economic concerns. Any coercive reproduction policy is still unethical, but the damage had been done. The government’s message that ‘one child is best’ stuck. And even though families are “allowed” to have more than one child, young adults in China are not — and the country’s birth rate continues to fall.
Xu Jianhua, a sociology professor, said in 2013, “To what extent [a two child policy] will affect the Chinese economy remains to be seen as people’s willingness to have a second child may not be as high as expected… Past research has shown that due to urbanization and modernization, urban citizen’s willingness to have more children is very low.”
While the U.S. and European nations never adopted the unethical approach of government-approved pregnancy (which included forced abortions), the mentality that ‘one child is best’ has taken hold of their societies as well. Vox reports that in 2010 in the US, there were more than seven family members available to care for each person over the age of 80. By 2030, there will only be four.
Many who see children as bothersome, whiny, financial drains and freedom stealers have never actually experienced being a parent. They have been trained to see only the negatives and to focus on the “self” and on doing what makes them “happy.”
If adults base their ideas of parenthood and children on what they see in the media or their local restaurant, they’re not seeing the full parenthood picture. What’s worse — they never will.
Well, yeah, if they have parents like you, they WILL grow up to hate them, Daoust.
Rather, what you have a fornicating society (which itself is wrong and bad), taught that pleasure need not results in its main intent (which include rampant $TIs), with overall spoiled, oversensitive kids (since most 1 or 2 children parents wait to have children until they can do so without the sacrifice generations prior to about 1960 faced, and have only 1 sibling and few relatives to learn how to get along, play with, share, etc. ) and lack discipline (since with one 1 or 2 kids, they are given more freedom) and initiative.
It is character and culture that matters.
I have lived and still do, in a "low-income, mainly Latino city of approx. 45,000 in 2 sq. miles in which most work (plenty of parking till night), yet the kids are overall certainly not poor as were were as a family of 7 beginning in the 50's. But the do have lots of relatives, with many frequent gatherings of such.
Meanwhile, despite the age old lament of overpopulation, (The early Christian writer Tertullian said (around AD 200, in De Anima): "We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us... Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.")
People have worried about overpopulation on Earth for centuries,.. But a new study found that feeding 10 billion people on Earth is not only possible—but it could be done sustainably as well. - https://news.uchicago.edu/story/feeding-10-billion-people-earth-possible-and-sustainable-scientists-say
Lawrence Solomon says,
In fact, the planet could comfortably manage 29 billion of us. To doubt the Earth can manage a mere quadrupling of today’s human population requires both a failure of imagination and a failure of arithmetic. (https://financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-can-earth-handle-29-billion-people-easy)Be single, celibate and continent, or be married and have as many children as God will give, in a life of temperance. Besides negative birth rate, spoiled, over sensitive children are one more of the effects of contraception.
Millennial women are having babies at a slower rate than any previous generation of women in American history. Between the year 2007 and 2012, the rate at which African American women in their 20s had children dropped by 14 percent. The rate at which Caucasian American women in their 20s had children dropped by 11 percent. The rate at which Hispanic American women in their 20s had children dropped by an astounding 26 percent. - https://defendernetwork.com/lead-story/intelligent-reasons-millennials-arent-kids/
Since 1950, the worldwide fertility rate dropped from an average of 4.7 children to 2.4 children. he US birth rate fell by 4% from 2019 to 2020, the sharpest single-year decline in almost 50 years, As Christine Percheski, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, told Insider, the declining birth rate is "about women having access to education and employment opportunities. It's about the rise in individualism. It's about the rise in women's autonomy and a change in values." - https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-birth-fertility-rate-declining-fewer-babies-2022-1#its-a-new-world-of-opportunities-for-women-which-has-prompted-them-to-seek-other-paths-to-fulfillment-1According to a new report that raises the possibility that a major shift in the ages when women tend to have kids is on the horizon. ..Until the 1980s, for as long as records were kept, the highest fertility rates worldwide were among women ages 20 to 24, Astone said.
That shifted in the United States and Europe sometime in the 1980s, when women ages 25 to 29 became the most fertile, she said.... We calculate that in 2012, women in their twenties had births at a pace that would lead to 948 births per 1,000 women, by far the slowest pace of any generation of young women in U.S. history,”... “If these low birth rates to women in their twenties continue, the U.S. might eventually face the type of generational imbalance that currently characterizes Japan and some European countries, but it is too early to predict or worry about that eventuality.” - https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/27/baby-bust-millenials-birth-rate-drop-may-signal-historic-shift.html
But there was a time—1850 to be precise—when huge households, chock full of tykes, were common and considered “right.” US Census data from 1850 show that families with six to nine kids were common.... the culture dictated that a woman’s place was in the home, and her fulfillment was found there, where she served her husband and raised her children. In his 1983 book Family and Divorce in California, 1850-1890, University of Oklahoma historian Robert Griswold cited an article published in the San Mateo Gazette in the mid-19th century that states, “Woman is set in the household and man is sent out into the world.”..Family size in the US peaked between 1860 and 1920 because infant mortality rates were declining while large families were still valued, according to Northern Kentucky University sociologist Joan Ferrante’s 1992 book Sociology: A Global Perspective. Even a woman of modest means could “be happy in the love of her husband, her home, and its beautiful duties without asking the world for its smiles and favors,” the article argued...
Women, Ferrante writes, “The mother’s median age at the time of her last child’s birth was 40 in 1850; by 1940 it had fallen to 27.3.” .. In 1980, less than 0.5% of all households had eight or more children; - https://qz.com/reparations-slavery-uk-trevelyan-grenada-1850156017
1890 (June) Avg. pop. per house-hold 4.93
1930 (Apr.) 4.11
1960 (Mar.) 3.35 - https://www.infoplease.com/us/family-statistics/us-households-size-1790-2006
By Robert Pear, Special To the New York Times April 15, 1987 The average number of people per household in the United States declined last year to 2.67, the least ever recorded, the Census Bureau reported today. - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/15/us/average-size-of-household-in-us-declines-to-lowest-ever-recorded.html
The average household was 5.79 people in 1790, which has significantly decreased to 2.58 in 2010. - https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-household-size-by-state
Dec 12, 2022 — The average American household consisted of 2.5 people in 2022. - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-households-in-the-us/
A basic solution as far as government is concerned would be simple insofar as possible: ban abortion (except for saving the actual physical life of the mother) and contraceptives, or at least treat the latter like cigarettes, unless needed for a medical condition. And reward married households while not rewarding single parents having additional children thru fornication (which very often perpetuates a cycle), partly by being diligent to find out if there is a man living with the mother while she lists herself as a single to collect more benefits thereby.
And promote adoption.
My two cents.
Nothing you said negates anything I said. My simple point is its not necessarily bad if the population goes down. Its just assumed going up is good, amd if it doesnt its automatically bad.
Its not a terrible thing if the population goes down. It doesn’t always have to keep going up. The human race will not go extinct. In fact we know from Scripture, we don’t go extinct.
The issue is not the world wide effects of population going down, but the real problem of this in most countries, while the major problem is the means by which the birth rate has dramatically declined. For in fact we know from Scripture that nations which are given to fornications will face judgment, and will go extinct.
And if all that matters is how it immediately affect you, then it does in many way, including your wallet:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.