Well crap! I can read articles but posts I apparently am challenged at!!! Should have clicked.
Yup. Already provided by you. D’oh.
Yup. Birth rates have complicated factors, and I just don’t see that one factor as being the most important. At least it doesn’t fit mitt my life experiences.
Did you grow up Mormon?
I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and our family of five kids was not a large family, either among my relatives or in the neighborhood.
The family across the street had eight kids and while most of them remained in the church, the kids averaged just over two kids each.
Similar things happened with my relatives as well.
It’s interesting because when I grew up, everyone was trying as hard as possible to make as many babies as possibly, and then the rates plummeted.
There are a lot of reasons why, but we don’t need to t
I think the answer will forever and always be to provide young women more support. If universities included housing for young families AND childcare, you’d have a baby boom. A generation would be graduating with 4-5yr olds. Women wouldn’t have to drop out of their careers to have a family.
My dad didn’t practice and none of us really did. Most my many aunts and uncles and cousins do but I barely know them. Despite not practicing I have been immersed in Mormonism in some capacity my whole life.
And I’m sure it’s been addressed but in the US I see less children as an economical side effect, back then a single middle-class income family could support 5+ kids. But with middle class shrinking… shoot it takes me and my partner to both work full-time to afford rent..
I doubt it. Maybe a very small uptick, but not a boom. Most young women in university are more likely want to go out and party (as are most young men). Not all, of course, but many. And still others just aren’t ready to settle down with a partner, and even those that do are going to want the freedom to travel, etc.
And it’s kinda silly to think they’d mostly be pregnant on week one to have kids that old, too. Not to mention those that just aren’t going to have kids until they have actual jobs that can support children, since there is a finite end date on this support. Or the horrible unfairness of subsidizing these kind of living/childcare expenses for the set that will almost certainly have far higher earning capacity that the non-university set (who would probably be more likely have kids under the childcare-and-financial-support conditions, anyway, since they have already commenced with “adult life” in a way university students have not, though not necessarily at 18) while not subsidizing it for those who need it much more, long term.
A desirable thing to do for its own sake. And young men too. But do you have any evidence that supports that belief? Across cultures the opposite is what has been consistently seen. The more highly educated and self sufficient young women are the lower the birthrate in the society.
Well educated self sufficient young people, girls and women, boys and men both, is a desirable outcome. And it results in lower birthrates.
I submit that there is no practical or desirable way to mitigate decreasing birthrates; we must instead adapt to that reality.
Yes, but as shown previously, the wealthy countries that have more support seem to have more kids than ones with less support. Here are some European countries estimated lifetime children per woman, from Wikipedia
(Wikipedia also has raw birth rates per population, which i indicated in parentheses. Crude birth rate refers to the number of births over a given period divided by the person-years lived by the population over that period.)
France 1.64 (missing)
US 1.62 (11)
Ireland 1.60 (12)
UK 1.54 (10)
Denmark 1.52 (11)
Portugal 1.52 (8)
Iceland 1.50 (13)
Czech 1.47 (11)
Germany 1.46 (missing)
Switzerland 1.44 (10)
Sweden 1.44 (11)
Netherlands 1.44 (10)
Norway 1.42 (10)
Luxemburg 1.4 (10)
Belgium 1.39 (10)
Greece 1.34 (8)
Poland 1.31 (9)
Finland 1.30 (missing)
Spain 1.21 (7)
Italy 1.20 (7)
Ukraine 1.00 (7)
I note that the two figures mostly track, except for Portugal. Dunno what’s up with that.
There are all sorts of factors involved in the fertility rate, and yes, even the highest of those is below replacement rate. But it sure looks to me like countries that support parents and maternity (like France) are doing a lot better in terms of looking at a slower decline than countries like Spain and Italy.
So FWIW according to Claude rating that list by support gives these top 8:
**1. Norway** – \~49 weeks at near-full pay, strong childcare subsidies
**2. Sweden** – 480 days shared parental leave, high replacement rate
**3. Iceland** – generous, gender-equal parental leave split
**4. Germany** – 14 weeks maternity at 100%, plus Elterngeld up to \~14 months
**5. Denmark** – 52 weeks combined leave, well paid, strong public childcare
**6. Finland** – generous Kela benefits, long leave entitlements
**7. Poland** – \~52 weeks maternity+parental at high pay rates
**8. Czech Republic** – long leave (up to 3 years), decent initial pay
Does not seem like a strong association?
France is next at 9. But US, Ireland, UK? The others that lead the list? Last, second to last, and sixth to last of the list.
I think the UK, US, and Ireland have other social things going on. Fertility in the US is strongly driven by recent immigrant families, who tend to have more kids. I suspect the same is true of the UK. I don’t have as much of a guess for Ireland, but i observe that when i was a kid there were three “ethnic groups” in my town, the WASPs, the Irish Catholics, and the Italian Catholics. (We Jews were a tiny minority. All the tiny minorities together had fewer people than any of those three groups.) And the Irish Catholics had much larger families than the other two groups, often having 8 or 10 kids. So there’s something cultural there. It at least, there was, and I’d totally believe some remnant of that is still relevant.
And there’s something screwy with the Portuguese data. It’s near the bottom by total birthrate.
I’m willing to bet that if you graphed “parental support” against fertility, you’d see a correlation, with outliers.
A nice guess? And I’m not graphing it myself but what I’m seeing seems pretty random? So my guess is no you wouldn’t. I suspect the other factors like immigration, like religiousity, so on, would graph more cleanly.
And asking Claude to do that, again FWIW … nope.
Graphing it is easy, it’s finding a numeric value for “support” that makes sense, and also, finding a place to host the image for the SDMB to link to. But the big one is quantifying “support”. I don’t know how to do that.
I certainly don’t think that explains all the differences, but i think it makes a real difference, and i think it’s pretty evident in the data.
If so not in the data you have provided. I’m not saying there is no correlation but I can’t see any and if it exists it certainly is weak at best.
But of course you are right about defining “support” … more female education clearly a strong negative correlation, but that is not the support meant.
I am open to actual data. That said it seems improbable to me: the costs of having a child even with social support are still so much bigger than any supports that their impacts seem unlikely to be significant.
It’s hard to imagine that couples would choose to wait till they’re drowning in student loan debt, to personally take on the health care costs of birthing a baby or two, if the university would have covered those costs while they were students.
(Four or five year olds unimaginable? I assumed some parents would get graduate degrees, so yeah, four and five year olds!)
And yeah, baby boom, I’m standing by it.
First the healthcare costs are only the start. But second - we were stupid enough to have our first when I was an intern. Having a child when you are needing to focus on a demanding time limited but performance matters other task is not a great choice.
Really few want to have their college experience be in competition with starting a family. They don’t want starting a family in competition with getting career established either. ISTM that the economics of it are less the issue than the wanting to get other steps of life established first.
Goodness, I can’t imagine giving birth to be of any interest to college students, great support or not.
That’s just nuts.
I will immediately agree that student loan debt is a great contraceptive.
But the fix for that is to eliminate usurious student loans, not to try to subsidize prenatal care for pregnant college women. Of which there will be very few.
This.
High birthrates are a sign of a society that is not actualizing its young people, but merely tasking them with breeding a new generation of workhorses.
A society composed mostly / almost entirely of actualized people will be a low growth or more likely slowly shrinking society. Which outcome, IMO, can only be celebrated.
That’s not really correct. If you are talking about truly “leisure class” rich where you literally have nothing to do all day, you are talking about whatever fraction of people whose income comes from trust funds or other passive forms. Anyone in the top 1-2% who is earning income from an actual job - physicians, lawyers, investment bankers, high performing salespeople, senior executives, etc - generally does not have more “free time”.
Similarly, other than chronically unemployed people, the poor generally don’t have more free time either as they tend to work one or more shift job and may not be able to afford child care.
I would image the actual correlation between poor people having more children is that having children early on before you have finished your education and established yourself in the workforce tends to keep you poor.
In my experience, the upper middle classes tend to not want to get married and have kids as early because they tend to want to focus on their careers as well as actually enjoy a child-free life for awhile. Hanging out with friends, going to restaurants, etc.
Personally, with 8.3 billion people and their collective impact on the environment and climate change, I don’t think "increasing the birthrate is a problem that needs solved.
Again, only my anecdotal experience, but I knew two women from very large families who only had two children apiece and didn’t want any more. One of them (the one from a family of 17 kids) hated her mother for having so many kids.
I don’t mean to enact a pile-on, but the idea that large and loving are somehow connected is simply nuts.
IMO / IME the two ideas are almost entirely orthogonal. For most of history people did not have large families because they were full of love.
Instead it was from a combo of:
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Perpetual pregnancy is simply inevitable until the mother finally runs out or dies.
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Simple economic necessity. When kids are a profit center when trying to run a subsistence farm or small craft shop, more isn’t just a good idea; it’s a total necessity.
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Needing to birth 8 to have 4 survive to late adulthood to take care of aging you.