What many young women don’t realize is that almost all careers are just a job. They think their “careers” are the most important. They are headed toward cats and wine.
You’ve given me an idea.
On subsistence, non-mechanized farms, the more children you have, the more help you’ll have. Even the very young can repair rice paddy walls from small breaches, or weed with their tiny hands. You live in poverty, but your family is your work force and there’s no place for laziness.
In an industrialized city, someone has to mind the children while you’re at work until they are old enough to work, too. When you come home and take over the child care for grandma san, you’re tired and burnt out from working all day, and the kids are clamoring for attention, and with more children there are more mouths to feed until they’re old enough to work in a factory, too, which is much more dangerous and exhausting than a child’s work on a small farm. So they are not helping until they’re ten years old or older. Until then, they’re a drain and a pain in the arse. Grandma san gets older and can’t be trusted with the youngest anymore, and the older ones treat them bad if not supervised, which grandma san might be too senile or feeble to do. So the incentives for having a lot of kids is extremely absent. They’re nothing but trouble.
What to do? Women want a career? Have in-house factory day care. The women working with the kids in the day-care have their maternal instinct awakened, and they want a bundle of joy of their own, which they can watch as part of their career as factory day-care workers. Mama san and Papa san go home together with baby, show them off on the subway, coo and play with the kid, and want brothers and sisters for their little darling.
Incentive problem solved. Population grows. North Korea doesn’t invade with their numerically superior army, because they won’t be numerically superior. US still considers South Korea a worth-while ally, and invests resources.
Thanks for saying what is really the problem. Modern feminism is the reason. Women have been lied too, that a career is more fulfilling than being a mother.